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.

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.

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.

As recently as 11,000 years ago--"near time" to geologists--mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of science's greatest riddles, these large animals vanished in North and South America around the time humans arrived at the end of the last great ice age. Part paleontological adventure and part memoir, "Twilight of the Mammoths "presents in detail internationally renowned paleoecologist Paul Martin's widely discussed and debated "overkill" hypothesis to explain these mysterious megafauna extinctions. Taking us from Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon, where he finds himself "chest deep in sloth dung," to other important fossil sites in Arizona and Chile, Martin's engaging book, written for a wide audience, uncovers our rich evolutionary legacy and shows why he has come to believe that the earliest Americans literally hunted these animals to death.
As he discusses the discoveries that brought him to this hypothesis, Martin relates many colorful stories and gives a rich overview of the field of paleontology as well as his own fascinating career. He explores the ramifications of the overkill hypothesis for similar extinctions worldwide and examines other explanations for the extinctions, including climate change. Martin's visionary thinking about our missing megafauna offers inspiration and a challenge for today's conservation efforts as he speculates on what we might do to remedy this situation--both in our thinking about what is "natural" and in the natural world itself.