The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs

A basic introduction for academic class work. The authors provide a basis for reading journal articles in greater depth.

EXCELLENT college textbook on this topic. This is a previous edition, so newer editions probably have much more up-to-date information that probably supersedes what was known/understood at the time this edition was published. My recollection is that I paid about $15 for this book used, and if I wanted to purchase the latest edition it is probably more than $100.However, my guess is that most of the background information is still 100% in alignment with the best, current thinking/research on this rapidly moving topic

Bought for my son as required reading before a dig. He said it was okay but a little outdated.

Comprehensive in the extreme - tough read. But ifyou really want to get the last word on this subject, thenthis IS your read.

Great book for the class that I am taking. Wonderful price.

It is an up to date and wonderful reference for avid paleontology fans.

IN VERY GOOD SHAPE. CHEAP PRICE. GREAT KIDS PRESENTS

Producing a complete and thorough book about Dinosauria can never be an easy task, and the authors have made a remarkable job by just trying. Yet, the book, in my opinion, fails to reach certain standards. There are some details that can turn a good book into a great one, and this book does not have them. First, the authors have a talent in creating literary boredom. The reason is not that they write in a technical fashion. In fact, I found the text quite, but not completely technical (one should read "Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath" to understand what "technical" really means). The authors just do not know how to write in an interesting way. It's a pitty, because few subjects can be more interesting than Dinosaurs, so I guess one must have a special talent in order to write something boring about these animals. Even with the boring style, the book could have been great, if it was not for the second sin. There is a cluster of missing details, details that are important. The constant failure to mention the approximate age of the species, other than some vague "Late Cretaceous", is annoying. It would have been very easy just to write the numbers (in mya)next to every species name when it is first mentioned in the text, or on the cladogram. Speaking of cladograms, the book contains many of them, but I find them to be crude in their construction. There is an obvious lack of a good general cladogram for all Dinosauria, along with approximate ages of the appearance of every clade; while for a book that is fond of cladistics, the one on p.322 is WRONG (it presents T.rex as a member of Maniraptora).I believe all these are the result of a third sin: the authors are unable to understand what is important and what is not. Thus, they fail to elaborate in some of the most important questions. Why were dinosaurs so big, why did they stay big for tens of millions of years, and hy did mammals never managed to get equally big? The authors just scratch the surface of the topic. Their description of the Mesozoic world in Ch.2 is inadequately short and vague. If I were a college professor and a student of mine produced Ch.5 (on the origin of dinosaurs) I would have rejected it as utterly amateuristic and inefficiently short. In a similar fashion, the chapter about land-dwelling Theropoda, the most fascinating of all dinosaurs, is too short and remarkably boring. Finally, in the end of every chapter we have a long and effectively boring list of the most useless information: who discovered what and when. The history of dinosaur discoveries can be an interesting subject, but it is not of use when there is a complete failure on giving information about when these magnificent animals lived. As a final touch in this masterpiece of boredom and mediocrity, there seems to be a strange sort of conspiracy to hide the fact that T.rex was not the largest theropod, coupled with a failure to present an illustration of the skull of important theropods, such as Carcharodontosaurus, or Baryonyx.So, if one wants to merely have a book about dinosaurs in one's library, this one is fine. As far as it concerns what is really written in the book, someone else must take up the task to write a new book. This one, despite the word "evolution" in its title, all it does is just to describe the categories of dinosaurs, order after order. It is as if the authors cannot understand what the word means. They say little about the evolution of the dinosaurs, almost nothing of their natural histories, they fail to balance their style between purely technical and entertaining, and they finally fail to emphasize the important issues. If one wants to buy a book about dinosaurs, I really cannot understand why one should pay for something that can never even compare with the quality of the topics about dinosaurs in Wikipedia.