The rise and fall of the dinosaurs

Paleontologist Steve Brusatte tells the dinosaurs' full 150-million-year run as one continuous story rather than a museum wall of species names. It starts with their unpromising beginning: small, unremarkable animals living in the shadow of bigger competitors after the Permian mass extinction, who only got their chance when a second extinction, triggered by volcanic eruptions at the start of the Triassic, cleared the field. From there Brusatte traces how they diversified into everything from sauropods the size of buildings to the first feathered dinosaurs, using CT scans and other new techniques that have let paleontologists reconstruct not just skeletons but behavior, growth rates, and even the color of feathers preserved in the fossil record.

The book's other argument, threaded through the science, is that dinosaurs never actually went extinct: birds are dinosaurs, in the same direct sense that humans are mammals, and the final chapters cover the asteroid impact at Chicxulub, what it did to the planet in its first days and years, and why that lineage survived it while every other dinosaur did not. Brusatte writes from inside his own fieldwork, in Scotland, China, New Mexico and elsewhere, rather than as a distant summarizer of other people's discoveries.

Published by William Morrow in 2018, it was a New York Times bestseller and was named a best book of the year by several outlets for its combination of technical grounding and narrative storytelling.