Steve talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his life and work, including the recent discovery of an incredibly well-preserved Pterosaur on the Isle of Skye, a place he likes to call Scotland’s Jurassic Park. Sabre-toothed flesh eaters, cow-sized plant guzzlers and a host of other warm blooded placental animals evolved alongside the badger sized burrowers. Within half a million years, mammals of all shapes and sizes had taken over on planet earth. All the big dinosaurs were wiped out and only the small ones with wings survived. Steve studies how, when an asteroid collided with earth 66 million years ago, the mammals got lucky. More recently, however, he’s focussed on the long history of mammals.įor hundreds of millions of years, our mammalian ancestors remained small. rex, Triceratops and all the other dinosaur species developed when he was a teenager and continues to this day. Why did the dinosaurs die out and the mammals survive? How did dinosaurs evolve into birds? If you met a Velociraptor today you’d probably mistake it for a large flightless bird, says Steve. Steve is a vertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist who specialises in the anatomy, genealogy, and evolution of dinosaurs, mammals, and other fossil organisms. (Apr.Steve Brusatte analyses the pace of evolutionary change and tries to answer big questions. Brusatte is not shy about saying what is not yet known, while making it clear that this is a truly exciting period, in which new fossils are being uncovered at a dizzying pace. His explanations of how sauropods became so large, the reasons for the dominance of Tyrannosaurus rex, the evolution of flying ability in some dinosaurs, and the factors leading to the demise of most of these creatures are carefully crafted and presented. Brusatte does a superb job of relating current research, both his own and that of many colleagues around the globe. This volume is a mix of memoir, chronicling Brusatte’s personal odyssey from a child smitten by dinosaurs to a member of a vibrant scholarly community, and first-rate science writing for the general public. His captivating text explores the excitement associated with searching for and discovering new dinosaur species, provides clues to many long-standing questions associated with dinosaurs, and furthers the understanding of ecological and evolutionary principles. As Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, ably demonstrates, dinosaurs are not just for kids.
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