The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

Written by Steve Brusatte

Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780062803139

Steve Brusatte

Steve Brusatte, PhD, is an American paleontologist who teaches at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. The paleontology advisor on the Jurassic World film franchise, Brusatte has named more than fifteen new species, including the tyrannosaur “Pinocchio rex” (Qianzhousaurus), the raptor Zhenyuanlong, and several ancient mammals. His research and writing has been featured in Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications.

Reviews for The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

[Raymond Doyle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book. Very informative. Highly recommended. Wunderbar. ?end.

[Emma Kester · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Pretty cool, nostalgic for a kid who was once obsessed with dinos

[Shiva Kannan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Great narration, with a ton of facts interspersed with the author’s perspective made for some great listening. It wasn’t a dry presentation of facts..more of an interesting and fact filled journey through time with the dinosaurs as the lead actors. The author leaves us with an intriguing question at the end.

[eunyoung · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

READ THIS. JUST DO IT. WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW

[Jose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating and worthwhile read on the history and science of the Age of Dinosaurs. For those familiar with the ancient reptiles and those who have no knowledge whatsoever, this book is perfect.

[Alex Brockman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It was a great listen for dinosaur lovers and preformed well

[Chelsea Levinson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great general overview of paleontology. Dispels many of the popular myths about dinosaurs as well.

[cheryl_in_cc_nv · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Was anything that I learned half a century ago accurate, or anything in the Jurassic Park movie? Seems not.... This is very much for dino fans, very readable, but not super-strict on phrasing for best presentation of the science, not enough pictures of models of dinos.

So, yeah, the bad: writes of evolutionary development as if it were intentional. Speaks of T.Rex and Triceratops as 'rivals.'* Too many scientific names of species I've never heard of for me to able to keep track w/out those missing pictures. Some awkward stretches for humor.

The good: Once I got the hang of reading it w/out fretting that I wasn't keeping track of every species named, I found it very engaging. And, yes, enlightening. And Brusatte does teach something about science. For example he does admit that new finds may overturn current assumptions, and he does explain *how* a lot of stuff that is understood came to be figured out:

"We can tell that Rex had some of the largest and most powerful jaw muscles of any dinosaur, based on the very broad and deep gullies on the skull bones where the muscles attached."

One species mentioned early I am going to google image search: Effigia okeeffeae....
... and "human-sized ominvorous theropods called oviraptororsaurs."
... and *The Age of Reptiles* mural.... balaur bondoc

"Proper grasslands would not develop until... many tens of millions of years after the dinosaurs cleared out." (I have to pick the nit of the word choice 'cleared.' Did dinosaurs prevent grass from evolving to become grasslands? I doubt it....)

"The Gobi fossils tell us that the ancestors of birds got smart before they took to the skies." Also got feathers, wings, and efficient lungs 'flow-through' lungs before that, too. "The feathers of nonflying, winged dinosaurs were a rainbow of different colors..." discovered from Jakob Vinther's studies of melanosomes, and probably used for display.

Walter Alvarez is Luis Alvarez' son.

Anyway, you can see that the good outweighs the bad. And no, despite all my notes, you can't skip this book if you're interested in the subject... I only mentioned a few of the my favorite bits; there are many more that you'll find interesting, too.

*"a person or thing competing with another for the same objective or for superiority in the same field of activity" ... not competing against each other for life...

[tuusannuuska-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

4,4 stars

I enjoyed the subject matter and the author's enthusiasm. Not the biggest fan of the incessant need to drop the personal anecdotes about the different specialists. The attempt to paint the paleontologists as rock stars is adorable.

[fionaanne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating read and superbly done.

[anniik_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a very interesting history of the dinosaurs. I am not a scientist but I found it engaging and easy to follow. I really enjoyed it!

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading the reviews for this book I felt like I was going to be reading a book not about dinosaurs. Hate saying this, but some of the negative reviews on here seem misleading and focusing too much on the parts that don't really matter.

The book is about what the title delivers. Some of this information isn't new to me, but I still learned a lot. Brusatte isn't writing for the science intellectuals. He's writing for the everyday person still interested in dinosaurs for whatever reason that may be.

He talks about Jurassic Park a bit in this book. It makes sense since he's only in his 30s and that's how most kids my age go into dinosaurs. However, that wasn't me. I didn't see the movie until recently, but loved learning about dinosaurs and still do because of books.

I loved the part of him talking about going to the Peabody Museum as a kid at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut. Have a special memory of that place with my grandfather and brother. We saw the bones and a stuffed dodo. My grandpa liked that we were all excited seeing this stuff. I think that's one reason I'm still interested in this stuff.

I think this is a book worth reading if you are still into dinosaurs. It's quick, easy, and a fun read with enough photos and cited sources.

[Anikattel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting book, with lots of information and entertaining. (Translated from Spanish)

[tobinelliott · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fun book that provides the reader with not only a history of the dinosaurs (the titular rise and fall), but also about the men and women that hunt their remains to understand them better.

Yes, you're going to get a shit ton of dinosaur names tossed at you, but the author also makes the history fun and real.

If you have an interest in dinosaurs, or would like a little more info on how accurate Jurassic Park was, this is a great place to start.

[philsyphe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a fascinating account of the dinosaurs. The author knows his stuff and succeeds in painting a vivid picture of how these prehistoric creatures lived.

Steve Brusatte could probably write an excellent novel with dinosaurs as characters. He creates the occasional short fiction interlude to better show how certain animals lived.

What I didn't like was the excess details on his personal life and even more so on the people he's worked with. This kind of thing is off-topic. A name-check is all that's needed.

Any reader approaching this book wants to learn about dinosaurs only, and not to read about the background of various scientists' lives, and certainly not read detailed descriptions of their physical appearance. We get way too much info on things like dining and dancing, which have no place in a book on dinosaurs.

Despite the irritation of the off-topic moments, I was so engrossed with the on-topic passages that I had to rate this five stars. So, niggles aside, I consider this a great read.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

seemed fine--hard for me to focus, plus there's a bunch of people waiting to read this after me at the library, so I stopped after 1-1/2 chapters. I think I'd do better with a PBS special, but lots of folks seemed to love the dinosaur bits in other reviews.

[dramman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Easy reading account of the Dinosaur age, the theories and latest findings. The author has travelled widely and draws upon a wide network of fellow paleontologists in giving examples to explain what went on.

[widdersyns · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was extremely readable and I enjoyed it. I think I expected it to go a little more in-depth with the science, which it did not.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A while ago, I found a book my parents bought for me when I was five or six years old (mid-1950s) during a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was a child's introduction to the evolution of animals and it focussed on dinosaurs. Much of that book is badly outdated, from the depictions of unfeathered dinosaurs to the then mystery of the dinosaurs disappearance. Brusatte covers all that has been learned since the 1950s, and puts what we knew then and now in the context of the geology, geography, climate and animal populations of each period. Sure, he highlights Tyrannosaurus rex and some other star animals, but he carefully traces what we know about their evolution and their habits. He also points out that dinosaurs were never the only creatures in their various environments and that a good bit of what we consider the age of dinosaurs was actually dominated by other reptiles. I kept turning the pages to see what else I didn't know!

[liscarey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is exactly what it says on the tin: a highly readable history of the dinosaurs, from their beginnings as very minor players in the early Triassic, to world-dominating predators and plant eaters in the late Cretaceous. And then the end of the Cretaceous, the meteor that ended dinosaur dominance--but not, as was once thought, the end of dinosaurs altogether.

Brusatte gives us both the story of the dinosaurs, and his own development from a teenager fanboying important paleontologists making major contributions to our knowledge of dinosaurs, to a student making his own first expeditions and contributions, and eventually an accomplished professional in the field.

Dinosaurs started out relatively small, and obscure, and got a boost from a mass extinction early in the Triassic. Brusatte takes us through their evolution, and the breakup of Pangea into separate continents. It's a fascinating story, more complex than I had previously fully realized.

Among the most interesting aspects of this are the evolution of the tyrannosaurs, and the evolution of the birds. These two stories are closely connected; birds, like tyrannosaurs and velociraptors, are in fact a type of theropod dinosaur. The dinosaurs aren't extinct; just most types of dinosaurs are extinct. One category of dinosaurs, the birds, are with us in the form of thousands of species.

But the extinction of most of the dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous, is of course a major part of their story, and part of the fascination of it. Why did all the other dinosaurs, including probably most of the birds, die out? Why did what became the modern birds, as well as mammals and enough reptiles to matter, survive? The meteor that caused the devastation, and how that impact was discovered, is another fascinating story, as is the story of why the survivors did survive in the face of that worldwide devastation. Brusatte does an excellent job of telling these stories and how the answers were discovered, as well as the things we don't know yet.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book.

[kerryd1971 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fabulous. It made me want to get off the couch and go looking for fossils!

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist who is clearly obsessed with dinosaurs, has produced a wonderful book about the dinosaurs themselves and about the science that has vastly increased our knowledge of them in recent years. He is immensely knowledgeable, not surprisingly since he is one of the world's leading experts in this field. He is also a terrific writer, using vivid every-day language to bring an ancient world to life. He also sounds like a great guy, and is amusing and inspiring in describing his fellow dinosaur scientists. This is a terrific read.

[JUAN PEDRO PABLO · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A few days ago, I was focused on writing a review of this book when, in a moment of distraction, I pressed a button and everything I had written was erased—everything I had written after about twenty minutes. It made me really angry, and I thought that just as in less than a second everything I had drafted was erased; likewise, in a brief span of time, the dinosaurs went extinct; well, if it wasn't due to a meteorite impact, it was something that caused such a significant change in their environment that they couldn't survive. It could have been the explosion of a large volcano that, with its toxic gases, caused tremendous mortality. Well, these are speculations...

However, in this popular science work by Steve Brusatte, which I find extraordinary because the subject and the author are very related; Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist and biologist, and the subject is precisely related to or is part of what paleontology studies, and who better than an expert to talk to us about it, a subject that he is passionately devoted to.

He starts by telling us how dinosaurs are classified, and to which time period, and in which stratum of the Earth's crust they are located or were found...

As we read further, he talks about the day-to-day life of a paleontologist. He does it as if he were a friend telling you about his work, and you can appreciate the excitement and passion he feels.

Good book, good writer, good researcher, and good paleontologist.

Highly recommended. (Translated from Spanish)

[Luluac · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A book that describes in a very engaging, simple way, but based on scientific data and discoveries, how dinosaurs evolved from the Triassic to the evolution of a few into birds.

The truth is that I loved it because although there are many topics I already knew, there are others that are not commonly discussed, such as the beginnings of dinosaurs in the Triassic, which surprised me greatly.

It is also a pleasure to recognize the names of paleontologists in its pages that you have heard of and who reveal new things about them, as well as what it means to be a paleontologist.

For me, this book is to paleontology what The World of Sofia was to philosophy. A great way to present a topic of considerable complexity in a very simple and enjoyable manner to the reader without falling into what gets the most publicity, like discussing the well-known dinosaurs.

Additionally, the mundane touches it reveals about paleontologists make us see that they are not oddballs, just as none of us who love this world are.

Very complete, very approachable for anyone regardless of their level of paleontological knowledge and with a very beautiful cover. (Translated from Spanish)

[Edd62 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A popular science book about current events in paleontology that not only brings us closer to the world in which they developed but also takes us on a journey through millions of years of biological history. It is written almost like a novel, interspersing anecdotes, history, and curiosities about the development of paleontology with descriptions of travels, fieldwork, and the challenges faced by Brusatte, from the beginning of his passion for dinosaurs to becoming what he is today, an authority on the subject thanks to his dedication and enthusiasm that are constantly put to the test. (Translated from Spanish)

[danielstj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a straightforward, rewarding text on the evolution of dinosaurs. It covered a wide range of territory and served, for me, as a primer to the world of dinosaurs in written form- me only having watched documentaries on dinosaurs before and learning about them, very briefly, through education. I thought this was a fine book. The writing, at times, even approaches better than just "good," it goes to great in some parts.

Overall, a satisfying read. You go in and get what you're looking for. 3.5 stars!

[breic-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is fine, but far from the best popular science book I've read recently. When I read a book like this, written by a scientist active in the field, I want to know what the work is like—both the day-to-day chores and the exciting discoveries. Who the people are, and what makes them tick. Unfortunately, this book doesn't say that much about how paleontologists work, and in particular there are very few details about the author's own work. Several times we hear about how he filled in a spreadsheet and ran an algorithm on it. Perhaps Brusatte thinks this work is too boring for most people to care? But I want to know the details! To be fair, Brusatte does try to give capsule portraits of quite a number of other paleontologists. The anecdotes are usually too brief and shallow, and can lack a punch line.

The book does do a decent job surveying the history of dinosaurs, explaining a few of our most recent discoveries as well. I think the book did a good job at consolidating information that I'd been vaguely aware of, but only from scattershot sources. But the information density isn't that high, and perhaps could also have been conveyed in a magazine article. Occasionally, Brusatte falls into the trap of listing species names. Taxonomy is dull.

Overall, I liked the book. It is a very quick read. I just wanted more!

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Steve Brusatte draws upon his extensive paleontological work and his friendships with others in the field to trace the earliest history of dinosaurs after the Permian mass extinction, through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods of dinosaur evolution as well as the evidence for the catastrophic impact that ended the Cretaceous, began the Paleogene, and made it possible for mammals to inherit the Earth. The work alternates between discussions of how dinosaurs, early birds, and other ancient reptiles lived and Brusatte’s own experiences as a paleontologist, which help to explain for the lay-reader just how scientists know what they know in language clear enough for the average person to grasp. His comments about those possessing the melanocortin 1 receptor notwithstanding (pg. 78), the overall effect is a must-read for all who remain fascinated with these massive creatures and their world, so unlike our own.

[geoffhabiger · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love dinosaurs. I got a degree in geology and spent several years attempting to get a masters degree in paleontology. I routinely attend the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, and I've written my own coloring/activity book about dinosaurs. So, take it as a verifiable dinosaur nerd that you need to read this book. Stephen presents a wonderful narrative and history of the age of dinosaurs, weaving in the latest scientific research with a witty and interesting narrative that encompasses his own love for dinosaurs that started well before his career as a paleontologist took off.

We learn about the end Permian extension that cleared the way for the dinosaur ancestors and eventually the dinosaurs themselves to take the stage in the Triassic. About the diversity and abundance of the dinosaurs during the Jurassic, and the pinnacle of the dinosaur empire during the Cretaceous. Stephen explains in very easy to understand language the latest science that explains how the dinosaurs proliferated to fill practically every niche in the world, how they were still thriving until the very end, and how dinosaurs continue to survive today, their lineage continuing as birds. (FYI - Birds ARE dinosaurs, if you've missed that bit of news.)

I highly recommend The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs to anybody who is not only a dinosaur lover, but who has an interest in the natural world around us and how we continue to explore and learn about our world's amazing history. Stephen Brusatte does a wonderful job of bringing this ancient animals to life, and clearing away a lot of the scientific dogma that has surrounded dinosaur science in the past several decades.

I listened to the audiobook version of the book read by Patrick Lawlor. There were no production problems with the book and Patrick does an excellent job of pronouncing not only the usual plethora of dinosaur names, but also the many out of the way localities around the world that often have names designed to be tongue-twisters.

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As I was reading this book there was a constant consideration in my mind as to how I was going to rate it, mostly in regards to the balance between the gossip (Brusatte loves his gossip) and the science. At a certain level you almost call this a high-level version of participatory journalism, as it seems quite clear that if Brusatte hadn't become a working scientist he still would have been a working journalist. Besides providing a tour d'horizon of the dinosaurs Brusatte is also giving you a history of the climate of this planet and how precarious things can be at the wrong moment; in regards to the subject he comes down very much on the side of the argument that views dinosauria as being in at least decent shape before the great meteor strike that ended it all.