Fossil hunting is by far the most fascinating of all sports. It has some danger, enough to give it zest and probably about as much as in the average modern engineered big-game hunt, and the danger is wholly to the hunter. It has uncertainty and excitement and all the thrills of gambling with none of its vicious features. The hunter never knows what his bag may be, perhaps nothing, perhaps a creature never before seen by human eyes. It requires knowledge, skill, and some degree of hardihood. And its results are so much more important, more worthwhile, and more enduring that those of any other sport! The fossil hunter does not kill, he resurrects. And the result of this sport is to add to the sum of human pleasure and to the treasure of human knowledge.

Approximately 380 million years ago, something strange and significant happened on Earth. That time is part of an interval of Earth’s history called the Devonian period by scientists such as geologists and paleontologists, but in more popular imagination, it is known as the Age of Fishes. The reason for this is that after about 200 million years of earlier evolution, the vertebrates—animals with backbones—had produced an explosion of fishlike animals that lived in the nearshore lagoons, river estuaries, and lakes of the time. The strange thing that happened from the middle to the later parts of the Devonian period is that some of these fishlike animals evolved limbs with digits—fingers and toes. Over the ensuing 350 million years, these tetrapods gradually evolved from their aquatic ancestry into walking terrestrial vertebrates. These have dominated the land ever since this initial explosive radiation allowed them to colonize and exploit the land and its opportunities. The tetrapods, with their limbs and fingers and toes, include ourselves as humans, so that this distant Devonian event is profoundly significant for humans as well as for the planet <...>

The remains of ancient sea reptiles have been found by humans for millennia and may have helped form the basis for belief in mythical beasts, including dragons and sea serpents. In the prescientific West the claim in the Genesis creation story that the planet and all life were formed just two or three thousand years before the great Egyptian pyramids were built hindered the scientific study of fossils.

Pterosaurs (meaning ‘winged lizard’) were the first vertebrates to fly (figure 1) and are therefore often referred to as ‘flying reptiles’. However, like the dinosaurs, they are only remotely related to modern reptiles. For the same reason, it is not correct to refer to pterosaurs as ‘flying dinosaurs’.

Come with me to the American Museum of Natural History on New York City's Central Park West. We walk up the broad stairs, dominated by the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States and a great benefactor of the museum. We enter the great Roosevelt Rotunda, where we are awed by one of the most dramatic dinosaur exhibits in the world —the mounted skeletons of a mother Barosaurus protecting her young one from an attacking carnivorous Allosaurus.

My adventures as a paleontologist have taken me to many exciting places at home, in the UK, and abroad, and led to the discovery of new species. Working with teams of colleagues, I named the new dinosaurs Eotyrannus, Xenoposeidon, and Mirischia, and the pterosaurs Vectidraco and Eurazhdarcho. One of the things that interests me most about dinosaurs, giant marine reptiles, and other ancient animals is that every one of them has a unique history, just as animals do today.

Эта книга посвящена необыкновенным рептилиям — динозаврам, владычествовавшим на Земле более 160 миллионов лет. С середины XIX века, когда были найдены их первые окаменевшие скелеты, динозавры владеют воображением не одного поколения людей — и детей, и взрослых. Благодаря терпеливой работе палеонтологов и других ученых, мы с каждым годом узнаем всё больше и больше о динозаврах, среде их обитания, питании и образе жизни.

Книга рассказывает про палеонтологические раскопки возле деревни Морозница в Архангельском крае. Здесь были найдены первые в нашем полушарии остатки ящеров казеид, живших в пермском периоде. На их примере показано, как ученые реконструируют среду обитания и образ жизни древних животных. Книга посвящена палеонтологу Владимиру Ильичу Жегалло.

The discovery of dinosaurs and other large extinct ‘saurians’, a term under which the Victorians commonly lumped ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and their kin, makes exciting reading. The story of how early ‘fossilists’ first found the remains of these ‘primeval monsters’ has been told again and again in popular and semi-popular books about the history of palaeontology. Mary Anning making a living by collecting extinct reptiles along the Dorset coast, William Buckland and Gideon Mantell finding the ‘terrible lizards’ for which Richard Owen was to coin the word ‘Dinosauria’, O. C. Marsh and E. D. Cope fighting over new fossil vertebrates in the American West – all of these well-known stories have almost achieved the status of legends, and have often been retold with little regard for historical or scientific accuracy. <...>

Like the world famous science fiction adventure films Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, the Gyeongnam Goseong Dinosaur World Expo and International Dinosaur Symposium has attracted a vast number of people. This Expo is held every three years at the world famous Goseong Dinosaur Track Site in Korea.

The Fourth Gyeongnam Goseong Dinosaur World Expo, held in 2016, attracted over 1.5 million visitors, including several tens of thousands of foreigners. In addition, millions of students have learned about the dinosaurs of Korea through their being introduced in elementary school, middle school, and high school science textbooks. <...>