rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez - My favorite first-person science book of all time. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck - Like so many people, I had to read this in high school. But my favorite book of his is this short writeup of his time living on a small island in the Scottish Hebrides, not too far from the Isle of Skye where I am doing a lot of fieldwork these days, looking for dinosaurs.ġ984, by George Orwell - Because it's more important now than ever to learn the lessons from this book. The Crofter and the Laird, by John McPhee - McPhee is the greatest scribe of geology and brings rocks to life in a way that nobody else can. I love reading history books, particularly those that explain the how and why of some of the most terrible moments in human history. Not really.except it paints a dystopic (but also touching) picture of what it might be like if humans faced a catastrophic extinction event.īloodlands, by Timothy Snyder - I study prehistory for a living, and always argue that fossils are important because they provide lessons from the past that could help us in the future.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy - A haunting novel that might seem to have nothing to do with dinosaurs. Brannen uses lucid prose to describe the major mass extinctions of Earth history and their relevance for understanding-and hopefully mitigating-the rapid changes in our world today. The Ends of the World, by Peter Brannen - One of my favorite science books of recent years, and one of the most important. The book that first brought the idea of active, dynamic, energetic, intelligent, successful dinosaurs to the reading public. The Dinosaur Heresies, by Robert Bakker - The gold standard for dinosaur books and the one that inspired me above all others when I got into dinosaurs as a teenager.

Steve Brusatte will discuss The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs on Wednesdy, 7/18, 6pm at the Co-op. A native of the Chicago area, he now lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Anne. He is also the “resident paleontologist” for BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs program. His academic research has been published by leading journals including Science and Nature (“Untangling the dinosaur family tree,” November 2017), and he authored a leading paleontology textbook, Dinosaur Paleobiology. He writes frequently for Scientific American, including the May 2015 cover story on the evolution of tyrannosaurs. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he completed his doctorate at Columbia University. Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.

Dinosaur book steve brusatte