Where do turtles hail from? Why and how did they acquire shells? These questions have spurred heated debate and intense research for more than two hundred years. Brilliantly weaving evidence from the latest paleontological discoveries with an accessible, incisive look at different theories of biological evolution and their proponents, Turtles as Hopeful Monsters tells the fascinating evolutionary story of the shelled reptiles. Paleontologist Olivier...

Revised, updated, and expanded with the latest interpretations and fossil discoveries, the second edition of Oceans of Kansas adds new twists to the fascinating story of the vast inland sea that engulfed central North America during the Age of Dinosaurs. Giant sharks, marine reptiles called mosasaurs, pteranodons, and birds with teeth all flourished in and around these shallow waters. Their abundant and well-preserved remains were sources of great...

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is the location of one of the best-known terrestrial records for the late Cretaceous. Prior fieldwork confirmed the richness of the area, but a major effort begun in the early twenty-first century has documented over 2,000 new vertebrate fossil sites, provided new radiometric dates, and identified five new genera of ceratopsids, two new species of hadrosaur, a probable new genus of hypsilophodontid,...

"This book is the first major study of this unique and highly diverse group. It introduces a wealth of knowledge about the dromornithids that has accumulated over the past two decades and that has led to an understanding of the relationships of these birds. Peter F. Murray and Patricia Vickers-Rich discuss in detail the history of the work on the dromornithids; the geological and geographical distributions of their remains; and their familial systematics,...

"Among the exciting events in recent dinosaur paleontology has been the discovery of new dinosaur fossils in South America, many of which are markedly different from their cousins to the north. Fernando E. Novas, one of the scientists closely involved with these important discoveries, presents an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the dinosaurs of South America. Novas reviews the dinosaur record in the region from Patagonia to Peru, discussing...