I’ve already written several books about fossils and paleontology, including a college textbook in paleontology for upper-level undergraduates (Bringing Fossils to Life, 2nd ed., 2013, Columbia University Press) and a popular book about fossil collecting (Fantastic Fossils, 2020, Columbia University Press), but I’ve never found a book that gives a good general introduction to vertebrate history for the general reader and fossil enthusiast with high-quality color illustrations, so this book is intended to fll that need.

Since the publication of my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (Columbia University Press, 2007; second edition, 2017), the fields of evolutionary biology and paleontology have made many new discoveries. Meanwhile, the evidence for evolution has been piling up and accumulating since publication in 1859 of the revolutionary book, On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Some of that evidence is discussed in my first evolution book, but much of it is new, or mentioned only briefly in that book. <...>

The New Yorker has commissioned many famous covers, but the most famous of all was the one that appeared on the March 29, 1976 issue. View of the World from yth Avenue is a charming work of ink, pencil, and watercolor by the artist Saul Steinberg. It is best viewed from bottom to top. At the bottom is Ninth Avenue, where you can easily make out the cars, streetlights, pedestrians, and a red and yellow sign in front of a lot that reads park. Your eye moves up a cross street to Tenth Avenue, and from there to the Hudson River, traversing the middle of the cover with an Amazonian majesty. Beyond the river is a grimy streak simply labeled Jersey. Beyond Jersey lies a non-descript block of green with three scattered mountains shaped like lumps of clay, along with a handful of names, like Kansas City, Chicago, and Utah. On the other side of the United States, the Pacific Ocean looks about the same size as the Hudson. <...>

Thomas Henry Huxley proclaimed the Origin of Species to be “the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of knowledge which has come into man’s hands since Newton’s Principia.” Ernst Mayr, arguably the greatest evolutionary theorist since Darwin, asserted that the Origin of Species triggered the greatest paradigm shift in the history of science. The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who inherited Huxley’s mantle as public intellectual, called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought. The philosopher of science Daniel Dennett called evolution the most dangerous idea in the history of science.<...>

On a recent afternoon spent in London’s Natural History Museum (NHM), I noticed that a life-size animatronic Velociraptor had finally sprouted feathers. They might have been a touch sparse compared to the plumage of counterparts in museums elsewhere, but it was encouraging to see them there. A few years earlier, the Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney had featured not only wonderful feathered fossils from China, but also models of shaggy carnivores that could have been swiped from Jim Henson’s workshop yet were still creepy enough to strike fear into the hearts of gobsmacked kids. <...>

For centuries, people had picked up huge bones in the ground and puzzled over their origins. In some parts of the world, they were thought to be the remains of legendary dragons, sea monsters, or Cyclopes. On the Greek island of Samos, the numerous large bones were thought to be the remains of Amazon warrior women who had died in battle. (We now know they are the remains of elephants, giraffes, antelopes, cattle, hyenas, and other mammals that were abundantly fossilized there.)

While gigantic vertebrae and other bones have been turning up for thousands of years to become woven into the legends of Native Americans and other cultures, the first scientifically recorded finds of what became known at first as “ceteosaurs”—and then sauropods—began in the 1830s. Like the evolution of the animals themselves, our human understanding of these dinosaurs took time to grow, often taking diversions until new finds and changes in scientific thinking happened to raise the curtain, each time a little bit more. <...>

The dinosaurs never expected it. Nor did any of the other organisms, from the tiniest bacteria to the great flying reptiles of the air that were thriving on a perfectly normal Cretaceous day 66 million years ago. One moment life, death, and renewal proceeded just as they had the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, stretching back through millions upon millions of years. The next, our planet suffered the worst single day in the entire history of life on Earth <...>

If any proof were needed that the study of prehis-toric life is more than a matter of “old bones,” then this book provides it in ample measure. For here is a natural history of times past, featuring real creatures that lived, breathed, reproduced — then died forever. That they could be brought back to life in such convincing form is a credit to the painstaking scientific detective work of a team of paleontologists, writers and artists.

The ceratopista or horn-faced dinosaurs are exquisite creatures. They include large, exotic dinosaurs, the ceratopsids, with wondrous ornaments on their heads, including dazzling combinations of horns over the nose and eyes and lengthy frills behind the skull, often enhanced with rococo tracery and detailing. The ceratopsids are found only in western North America, although perhaps someday soon they will be found in Asia as well. Ceratopsians also include small, lithe protoceratopsids, shared equally between Asia and western North America. Protoceratopsids, which tend to be more tasteful and restrained in their adornments than ceratopsids, presumably include the ancestors of the ceratopsids. Recently admitted into the ceratopsian clan is the small Psittacosaurus from Asia, which is so generalized in its structure that it has neither horns nor a frill. <...>