Brusatte follows these magnificent creatures from the Early Triassic period at the start of their evolution, roughly 250 million years ago, through the Jurassic period to the end of the Cretaceous period (66 million years ago), when a giant meteor struck the earth and all non-bird species went extinct.īrusatte traces their evolution from small shadow dwellers – themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period – into the long-necked, armoured carnivores we are familiar with today. In this ambitious and engrossing narrative history that spans nearly 200 million years, Stephen Brusatte, a young American palaeontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field – discovering ten new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies – tells the complete story of the life and death of the dinosaurs. And yet between them, the combatants presided over the discovery of hundreds of species, including what Brusatte calls “ones that roll off the tongue of every schoolchild: Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus.The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a sweeping narrative scientific history that tells the epic story of the dinosaurs, examining their origins, their habitats, their extinction, and their living legacy, from one of the most accomplished young palaeontologists in the world today. The Bone Wars, as the conflict was called, reached their nadir when Marsh had a fossil field dynamited to keep Cope from exploring it to gain an edge, in other words, Marsh destroyed knowledge.
Culp and Marsh didn’t want merely to name dinosaurs they also wanted to describe and classify them in scientific journals, each man showing off his erudition, buttressing his claim to be the discipline’s top dog. “Once chummy,” Brusatte writes, they “had let ego and pride metastasize into a full-on feud, which was so radioactive that they would do anything to one-up each other in an insane battle to see who could name the most new dinosaurs.” Here is one of the few places in the book where I wish the author had dug a little deeper. The only scientists Brusatte speaks ill of are long dead: the batty 19th-century rivals Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.
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