Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet
by Donald R Prothero (9780231146609)

Donald R. Prothero's science books combine straightforward research with first-person narratives of discovery, injecting warmth and familiarity into a profession that desperately needs a more appealing approach to nonspecialists. Bringing his trademark style to an increasingly relevant subject of concern, Prothero links the climate changes that have occurred over the past 200 million years to their effects on plants and animals, especially contrasting the extinctions that ended the Cretaceous period, which wiped out the dinosaurs, with those of the later Eocene and Oligocene epochs.Prothero begins with the "greenhouse of the dinosaurs," the global-warming episode that dominated the Age of Dinosaurs and the early Age of Mammals. He describes the remarkable creatures that once populated the earth and uses his experiences collecting fossils in the Big Badlands of South Dakota to sketch their world. He then discusses the growth of the first Antarctic glaciers, which marked the Eocene-Oligocene transition. In following this dramatic transformation, Prothero shares his anecdotes of excavations and activists and illuminates the controversies between colleagues that shape our understanding of the contemporary and prehistoric world. He concludes with observations about Nisqually Glacier and other locations that prove global warming is happening much quicker than previously predicted, irrevocably changing the balance of the earth's thermostat.

USD $42.88

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