Wildlife of Gondwana: Dinosaurs and Other Vertebrates from the Ancient Supercontinent (Life of the Past) Book

From the late Paleozoic to the early Mesozoic eras, roughly 350 million to 140 million years before the present, the latter-day continents and subcontinents of Antarctica, India, Australia, Africa and South America formed a single landmass, a southerly "supercontinent" that contemporary scientists call Gondwana. The physicist Alfred Wegener posited the existence of Gondwana as early as 1912, but only in the 1960s was his theory of continental drift widely accepted; since that time, considerable evidence has been gathered about Gondwana's ancient flora and fauna, much of it from Australia, which the authors of this handsomely illustrated volume deem a kind of "Noah's ark" of species found almost nowhere else. Some of those animal types, such as the allosaurid dinosaurs and the labyrinthodont amphibians, may have endured on Gondwana long after they went extinct on its northern-hemisphere counterpart; others, such as the placental mammals and certapsian dinosaurs, may have developed on Gondwana. First published in 1992, this book offers a useful introduction to plate tectonics and other tenets of modern geology, as well as a fine catalogue of long-extinct creatures such as the sauropod, pterosaur and iguanodont. The revised edition recounts recent discoveries from southern Africa, India and Patagonia that augment the fossil record and correct earlier classification schemes. --Gregory McNameeRead More