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Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Other Fossils from Montana to Mongolia
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About Time Traveler: In Search Of Dinosaurs And Other
Product Description Hunting for fossils with a preeminent guide and teacher Michael Novacek, a world-renowned paleontologist who has discovered important fossils on virtually every continent, is an authority on patterns of evolution and on the relationships among extinct and extant organisms. Time Traveler is his captivating account of how his boyhood enthusiasm for dinosaurs became a lifelong commitment to vanguard science. He takes us with him as he discovers fossils in his own backyard in Los Angeles, then goes looking for them in the high Andes, the black volcanic mountains of Yemen, and the incredibly rich fossil badlands of the Gobi desert. Wherever Novacek goes he searches for still undiscovered evidence of what life was like on Earth millions of years ago. Along the way he has almost drowned, been stung by deadly scorpions, been held at gunpoint by a renegade army, and nearly choked in raging dust storms. Fieldwork is very demanding in a host of unusual, dramatic, sometimes hilarious ways, and Novacek writes of its alluring perils with affection and discernment. But Time Traveler also makes sense of many complex themes - about dinosaur evolution, continental drift, mass extinctions, new methods for understanding ancient environments, and the evolutionary secrets of DNA in fossil organisms. It is also an enthralling adventure story. Amazon.com Review If you're of a certain age, you likely went through a dinosaur phase as a kid, perhaps even dreaming of turning up the bones of stegosauruses, tyrannosauruses, and other famed creatures of the Age of Reptiles. In this affectionate memoir of "a life in the field," paleontologist Michael Novacek writes of his early years entertaining such dreams and of his ongoing education in the ways of the "terrible lizards." Now curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, Novacek has traveled the world on the trail of fossils and ancient bones, collecting thousands on thousands of specimens. Often, we gather from his pages, his expeditions have been fraught with danger, whether in the form of some exotic disease or some incautious driver on a faraway road. No matter: for Novacek, the thrill of the hunt is reason enough to shrug off peril, and he shares charming anecdotes drawn from his decades of fieldwork, as well as his understanding of what such research can teach us about the past and present alike. Armchair travelers and paleontologists in training, to say nothing of readers going through a dinosaur phase of their own, will take much pleasure in Novacek's journeys into his--and the planet's--past. --Gregory McNamee From Publishers Weekly Transporting readers to dinosaur excavations across the globe, paleontologist Novacek (Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs) offers a spellbinding natural history of our planet, as well as the equally fascinating story of how he fell into the profession. As a child, Novacek mined for bones in the backyards of Los Angeles, studied the geostrata of the Grand Canyon, discovered a trilobite fossil in a Wisconsin quarry and frequently visited the local La Brea Tar Pits. Though Novacek claims he's no Indiana Jones, he finds himself on the wrong side of a gun more than once whether the gun be held by Mexican drunkards or the Yemeni army. The most rousing passages depict stormy expeditions to Chilean Patagonia in search of fossilized whale vertebrae along an ancient shoreline in the Andes an incredible 10,000 feet above sea level. Novacek's team also discovered rare dinosaur trackways that today appear to scale the vertical walls of deep canyons, and the team accomplished what Charles Darwin set out to do 150 years earlier they collected fossils of giant sloths, armadillos and the peculiar glyptodonts for the study of mammalian vertebrae. Novacek mixes heady science his explanations of Carbon-14 dating, geological development, ancient magnetic forces and paleontological history are clear and dynamic with hard-grit adventure,
