Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs - Hardcover

Michael Novacek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385477740 ISBN 13: 9780385477741

Publisher: Anchor Books, 1996

Synopsis

Over the past six years, Michael Novacek, Dean of Science at the American Museum of Natural History, has led a team of international scientists to Mongolia's Gobi Desert on the greatest dinosaur expedition of the late twentieth century. Closed to the West since the 1920s and opened only to Michael Novacek's team, the remote sands of the Gobi Desert constitute the richest fossil site in the world. In Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, Novacek takes the reader along with his team as he re-creates the day-to-day drama of field exploration over the last six years and recounts the remarkable discoveries that he and his colleagues unearthed. Following early years of relative disappointment, in 1993 the expedition discovered the richest Cretaceous dinosaur site ever found, excavating fossils that have helped to reshape our understanding of the dinosaur and early mammal era. Interweaving the adventure of field research with chapters that offer in depth discussions on contemporary dinosaur research and science, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs makes for the best kind of science--an engrossing narrative that brings compellingly to life the thrill and excitement of scientific discovery.

About this title

Review

One of the fields of study opened up by the collapse of Communism is, oddly enough, that of the distant past: Western archeologists have for the first time in six decades been allowed to explore the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. This is the region explored in the 1930s by the famed Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History. It is also the region wonderfully described in this stirring book by Michael Novacek, the current curator of the museum's department of vertebrate paleontology, who led the recent expeditions onto the high desert and into the heart of the Cretaceous Period in Asia. In 1993, Novacek's expedition found an astonishing trove of fossils in a wasteland called Ukhaa Tolgod, not too far from the Flaming Cliffs where Andrews made his most important finds. But, as with all great travel adventure stories, getting to Ukhaa Tolgod is the real tale.

About the Author

Michael Novacek is Senior Vice President and Provost of Science, as well as Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385477740
• ISBN 13: 9780385477741
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 367
• Illustrator: Ed Heck