BOOK REVIEW:

Grab your chisel and brush… We’re going on a fossil hunt.

Dinosaurs somehow got even more interesting.

ERE’S AN interesting thought: About 10 000 species of dinosaurs still exist today. Yep. It’s true. Birds are, in fact, dinosaurs (and yes, this was probably the single most important fact ever discovered by palaeontologists).

Dinosaurs were around for 150 million years. Humans? 300 000 years, maybe less. It’s no wonder that new fossils are being uncovered every single day. Meet Steve Brusatte, a millennial palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh who will reignite your childhood fascination with dinosaurs and fill your head with deliciously geeky dinner party factoids thanks to his compelling new book.

The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World is a surprisingly easy read. Densely packed with illustrations and photographs, it is Brusatte’s personal journey as an intrepid young fossil hunter, the brilliant people he’s met along the way and some crowd-pleasing dino facts… Such as: Did you know that a Tyrannosaurus Rex was strong enough to bite through a car? Or that we now think most dinos probably had feathers?

In just over 400 pages, Brusatte condenses 150 million years of dino evolution. He also manages to frame each chapter with a discussion of the major palaeontological work and fossil discoveries at the time, which provides good context for understanding what happened without having been there. From Allosaurus to Zuniceratops, from the Palaeozoic to the Cenozoic era, Brusatte’s undying passion for his field is invigorating, and with this book he’ll absorb you into a vivid, dangerous and compelling world where dinosaurs once reigned supreme.

‘Right now is the golden age of dinosaur research. Somebody, somewhere around the world, is finding a new species of dinosaur now, on average, once a week.’ – Steve Brusatte

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte (Pan Macmillan) is out now.