This book is dedicated to the palaeontogical site of Kromdraai, one of the most well-known sites of the ‘Cradle of Humankind’, the famous UNESCO World Heritage site located in the Gauteng province (South Africa). From 1938 to 1943, Robert Broom described important hominin fossil discoveries from Kromdraai as belonging to a single individual and designated the type specimen as one of our distant relatives, called Paranthropus robustus.

"Fossils are the fragments from which, piece by laborious piece, the great mosaic of the history of life has been constructed. Here and there, we can supplement these meager scraps by the use of biochemical markers or geochemical signatures that add useful information, but, even with such additional help, our reconstructions and our models of descent are often tentative. For the fossil record is, as we have seen, as biased as it is incomplete. But fragmentary, selective, and biased though it is, the fossil record, with all its imperfections, is still a treasure. Though whole chapters are missing, many pages lost, and the earliest pages so damaged as to be, as yet, virtually unreadable, this-the greatest biography of all-is one in whose closing pages we find ourselves."-from Origins In Origins, Frank H. T. Rhodes explores the origin and evolution of living things, the changing environments in which they have developed, and the challenges we now face on an increasingly crowded and polluted planet. Rhodes argues that the future well-being of our burgeoning population depends in no small part on our understanding of life's past, its long and slow development, and its intricate interdependencies. Rhodes's accessible and extensively illustrated treatment of the origins narrative describes the nature of the search for prehistoric life, the significance of geologic time, the origin of life, the emergence and spread of flora and fauna, the evolution of primates, and the emergence of modern humans.

Geared towards a broad variety of students, Dinosaurs: The Textbook, sixth edition, is a concise and lucid presentation of the biological and geological concepts of dinosaur science. It clarifies the evolution, phylogeny, and classification of the various species while modeling the best approach for navigating new and existing research. Revised to reflect recent fossil discoveries and the current consensus on dinosaur science, this text moves through the major taxonomic groups-including theropods, sauropodomorphs, ornithopods, ceratopsians, pachycephalosaurs, stegosaurs, and ankylosaurs-and concludes with updated chapters on the behavior and extinction of the dinosaurs, their biological relationship to birds, and their representation (or misrepresentation) in art, literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. The sixth edition represents a major revision of the leading text for an introductory course on dinosaurs, including comprehensive updates based on the latest scientific discoveries, research, and literature. With an extensive art program revised by leading paleoartists that features cutting-edge illustrations, it is a complete reader-friendly pedagogical package with extensive end-of-chapter summary tools, review questions, a detailed glossary, a dinosaur dictionary, and a comprehensive index. Please visit our supplemental materials page (https://cup.columbia.edu/extras/supplement/dinosaurs-the-textbook-sixth-edition) to find study and teaching aides for both students and teachers using Dinosaurs: The Textbook, sixth edition in class.

In this remarkable interdisciplinary study, anthropologist Brian Noble traces how dinosaurs and their natural worlds are articulated into being by the action of specimens and humans together. Following the complex exchanges of palaeontologists, museums specialists, film- and media-makers, science fiction writers, and their diverse publics, he witnesses how fossil remains are taken from their partial state and re-composed into astonishingly precise, animated presences within the modern world, with profound political consequences. Articulating Dinosaurs examines the resurrecting of two of the most iconic and gendered of dinosaurs. First Noble traces the emergence of Tyrannosaurus rex (the "king of the tyrant lizards") in the early twentieth-century scientific, literary, and filmic cross-currents associated with the American Museum of Natural History under the direction of palaeontologist and eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Then he offers his detailed ethnographic study of the multi-media, model-making, curatorial, and laboratory preparation work behind the Royal Ontario Museum's ground-breaking 1990s exhibit of Maiasaura (the "good mother lizard"). Setting the exhibits at the AMNH and the ROM against each other, Noble is able to place the political natures of T. rex and Maiasaura into high relief and to raise vital questions about how our choices make a difference in what comes to count as "nature." An original and illuminating study of science, culture, and museums, Articulating Dinosaurs is a remarkable look at not just how we visualize the prehistoric past, but how we make it palpable in our everyday lives.

Taphonomic studies are a major methodological advance, the effects of which have been felt throughout archaeology. Zooarchaeologists and archaeobotanists were the first to realise how vital it was to study the entire process of how food enters the archaeological record, and taphonomy brought to a close the era when the study of animal bones and plant remains from archaeological sites were regarded mainly as environmental indicators.This volume is indicative of recent developments in taphonomic studies: hugely diverse research areas are being explored, many of which would have been totally unforeseeable only a quarter of a century ago.

Full color, full page reconstructions of life in Virginia from the Cambrian Period (over 500 million years ago) down to the present day. Includes color drawings of representative living plants and animals as well as fossil specimens. Simplified paleogeographic and geologic maps are provided for each period of Earth's history that is represented in Virginia's fossil record. By the author of "Fossil Collecting in the Mid-Atlantic States" and many other books about fossils, prehistoric life, and human and natural history.