The princeton field guide to predator dinosaurs / Принстонский полевой справочник по хищным динозаврам

If I were, at about age twenty as a budding paleozoologist and paleoartist, handed a copy of this book by a mysterious time traveler, I would have been shocked as well as delighted. The pages would reveal a world of new flesh- and, in some cases, plant-eating dinosaurs and ideas that I barely had a hint of or had no idea existed at all. My head would spin at the revelation of the therizinosaurs, such as the wacky feathered Beipiaosaurus, and at the biplane flying dromaeosaurs, not to mention the little halszkaraptors with their duck-like beaks, the brow horns and atrophied arms of bulldog-faced Carnotaurus, or the bat-like membranous wings of scansoriopterygids. What to make of the island-dwelling Balaur and its weird feet? It is a particular pleasure to restore the skeleton of the once mysterious Deinocheirus, long known from only its colossal arms—its peculiar skeleton does not disappoint. And who would have imagined it would become possible to figure out the colors of some feathered dinosaurs? I would note the new names for some old dinosaurs, including that now there are three royal species of Tyrannosaurus: T. rex, T. regina, and T. imperator. And that direct evidence of head-to-head combat between the tyrant king and horned Triceratops would show that the latter survived. There would be the dinosaurbearing beds with the familiar yet often exotic names: Morrison, Chinle, Wessex, Lameta, Tendaguru, Oldman, Kirtland, Djadokhta, Nemegt, Cloverly, Judith River, New Egypt, Navajo Sandstone, Horseshoe Canyon, Forest Sandstone, Santa Maria, Lowenstein, Bahariya, Hell Creek, Chaneres, Kayenta, Portland, Lufeng, and Lance. Plus there are the novel formations, at least to my eyes and ears: Yixian–Jiufotang, Tiourarén, Dinosaur Park, Longjiang, Lourinha, Barun Goyot, Two Medicine, Iren Dabasu, Anacleto, Painten, Santana, Rio Neuguen, Shishugou, Demopolis, Huincul, Aguja, Ischigualasto, Nanxiong, Kaiparowits, Qingshan, Qiaotou, Cerro del Pueblo, Hanson, Snow Island Hill, Tiaojishan, Echkar, Elliot, Candeleros, Los Colorados, Tropic Shale, Pari Aike, Maleri, Portezuelo, Prince Creek, Majiacun, Ulansuhai, Shinekhudag, Kitadani, Calizas de la Huérguina, and Maevarano. The sheer number of new dinosaurs would demonstrate that an explosion in dinosaur discoveries and research, far beyond anything that had previously occurred and often based on new high technologies, marked the end of the twentieth century going into the twenty-first.Confirmed would be the paradigm shift already under way in the late 1960s and especially the 1970s that observed that dinosaurs were not so much reptiles as they were near birds and often paralleled mammals in form and function. Dinosaurs were still widely seen as living in tropical swamps, but we now know that some lived through polar winters so dark and bitterly cold that low-energy reptiles could not survive. Imagine a small dinosaur shaking the snow off its feathery insulation while its body, oxygenated by a birdlike respiratory complex and powered by a high-pressure four-chambered heart, produces the heat needed to prevent frostbite. Producing this book has been satisfying in that it has given me yet more reason to achieve more fully a long-term goal: to illustrate the skeletons of almost all predatory dinosaur species for which sufficiently complete material is available. These restorations have been used to construct the most extensive library of side-view life studies of dinosaur hunters in print to date. The result is a work that covers what is now two centuries of scientific investigation into the group of animals that ruled the continents for over 150 million years. Enjoy the travel back 175 million years <...>