The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extraordinary, 200-million-year-long story as never before.
After reading The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, I think ... Brusatte’s mastery of his field, formidable explanatory powers and engaging style have combined to produce a masterpiece of science writing for the lay reader. I would add that you’ll find Rise and Fall fascinating even if you don’t give a damn about dinosaurs — but first, show me someone who doesn’t give a damn about dinosaurs.
...a phenomenal tome chronicling the ebbs and flows of various prehistoric eras and the lives of the dinosaurs and other amazing creatures that inhabited the Earth at the time. Brusatte’s brain-meltingly detailed timeline of dinosaur history takes us through different eras...bringing to life the staggeringly alien worlds that the Earth has been in the past ... Not only is this the best, most engrossing book about dinosaurs I’ve ever read, but it’s a book that manages to make you truly believe and understand what life was like for these creatures. Staring at a skeleton and letting your imagination wander is all well and good, but it takes a scientist AND a writer like Brusatte to bring that world to life in startling detail.
Brusatte is...a writer of what he calls 'pop-science,' and we are its victims ... It’s enough to make you wish that Henry Osborn—the paleontologist and head of the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century—had called the species Tyrannosaurus civis, if only to forestall the monarchical metaphors. This kind of writing isn’t merely exuberant nonsense, the metaphorical stumblings of an excitable scientist. It’s language that works against the grain of the science it’s trying to explain. To say, as Brusatte does, that acidifying oceans, capable of dissolving the shells of sea creatures, are 'why we don’t bathe in vinegar' is ridiculous ... Steve Brusatte has created a lost world of his own, where metaphors war anachronistically in defiance of what scientists understand. He didn’t invent this kind of writing. He grew up on it, and sadly we’re surrounded by it.
