Having grown up reading that birds were at most only distantly related to dinosaurs, I was both startled and fascinated when a growing number of researchers began to argue that birds were the direct descendants of the terrible lizards. At the end of the 1970s, I was becoming involved in the ar¬ gument both as an artist and a scientist. Art and science could not be separated; the science deter¬ mined whether I should adorn the small predatory dinosaurs with scales or with feathers. Alas, there was no simple answer at the time, because there was no fossil evidence for either possibility. What I found disturbing was that many paleontologists were totally biased against illustrating dinosaurs with feathers, even though the available data was neutral on the subject. This bias only boosted my interest in researching bird origins. <...>

Более трех десятилетий прошло после выхода в свет монографии Н. Н. Боголюбова (1911), но работы, проведенные в течение этих лет, не много добавили к познанию среднеюрской фауны плезиозавров, и как характер последней, так и соотношение верхнеюрской и лейасовой фаун остаются и до настоящего времени неясными и неопределенными.
При таком положении, естественно, приобретают совершенно исключительный интерес остатки плезиозавров из юрских отложений Восточной Сибири, где они были найдены в сопровождении типичной среднеюрской фауны аммонитов и пелеципод. Ценность этих остатков еще более увеличивается тем, что они принадлежат роду Eretmosaurus Seeley, известному до сих пор лишь из лейаса Англии и Германии и ставившемуся Н. Н. Боголюбовым (1911) в основание генетической ветви вс^х верхнеюрских и меловых Elasmosauridae. <...>

Last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the Jehol Biota both within the scientific community and among the general public
worldwide. The numerous research papers on the Jehol Biota, published in the prestigious journals such as Natllre and Science, have generated heated controversies among scientists and gained a widespread media frenzy.

The dragon blinked in the fierce light of the sun as it emerged from the clouds and banked hard, its tremendous wings arching under the load. Reflected in a massive dark eye, the world below slowly tilted into view. Vast herds of dinosaurs were strung out across a dusty yellow-orange plain, occasionally gathered in knots where they had stopped to feed on patches of stunted vegetation. Then came marshes and— the dragon focused— a long, still, clear-blue lake.

В современной нам экосистеме нет суперхищников. Нам трудно представить себе животное длиной 14 метров и весом под 10 тонн, нападающее на травоядных животных сопоставимого размера. Именно таким был самый знаменитый хищник всех времен – тираннозавр. В изучении палеобиологии тираннозавров и других динозавров за последние годы были сделаны выдающиеся открытия. Каждый год описываются десятки новых видов динозавров. Эта книга – невероятно интересное и подлинно научное путешествие длиной 100 миллионов лет, от среднеюрского до конца мелового периода. В ней известный специалист по тираннозаврам Дэвид Хоун дает наиболее полное представление об эволюции и всех сторонах жизни этих удивительных древних рептилий и их современников в свете новейших палеонтологических исследований.

Fossil hunting is by far the most fascinating of all sports. It has some danger, enough to give it zest and probably about as much as in the average modern engineered big-game hunt, and the danger is wholly to the hunter. It has uncertainty and excitement and all the thrills of gambling with none of its vicious features. The hunter never knows what his bag may be, perhaps nothing, perhaps a creature never before seen by human eyes. It requires knowledge, skill, and some degree of hardihood. And its results are so much more important, more worthwhile, and more enduring that those of any other sport! The fossil hunter does not kill, he resurrects. And the result of this sport is to add to the sum of human pleasure and to the treasure of human knowledge.

Approximately 380 million years ago, something strange and significant happened on Earth. That time is part of an interval of Earth’s history called the Devonian period by scientists such as geologists and paleontologists, but in more popular imagination, it is known as the Age of Fishes. The reason for this is that after about 200 million years of earlier evolution, the vertebrates—animals with backbones—had produced an explosion of fishlike animals that lived in the nearshore lagoons, river estuaries, and lakes of the time. The strange thing that happened from the middle to the later parts of the Devonian period is that some of these fishlike animals evolved limbs with digits—fingers and toes. Over the ensuing 350 million years, these tetrapods gradually evolved from their aquatic ancestry into walking terrestrial vertebrates. These have dominated the land ever since this initial explosive radiation allowed them to colonize and exploit the land and its opportunities. The tetrapods, with their limbs and fingers and toes, include ourselves as humans, so that this distant Devonian event is profoundly significant for humans as well as for the planet <...>

The remains of ancient sea reptiles have been found by humans for millennia and may have helped form the basis for belief in mythical beasts, including dragons and sea serpents. In the prescientific West the claim in the Genesis creation story that the planet and all life were formed just two or three thousand years before the great Egyptian pyramids were built hindered the scientific study of fossils.

Pterosaurs (meaning ‘winged lizard’) were the first vertebrates to fly (figure 1) and are therefore often referred to as ‘flying reptiles’. However, like the dinosaurs, they are only remotely related to modern reptiles. For the same reason, it is not correct to refer to pterosaurs as ‘flying dinosaurs’.

Come with me to the American Museum of Natural History on New York City's Central Park West. We walk up the broad stairs, dominated by the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States and a great benefactor of the museum. We enter the great Roosevelt Rotunda, where we are awed by one of the most dramatic dinosaur exhibits in the world —the mounted skeletons of a mother Barosaurus protecting her young one from an attacking carnivorous Allosaurus.