Time Traveler
In Search of Dinosaurs and Other Fossils from Montana to Mongolia
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher 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.
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, making for a passionate memoir that readers will find appealing, especially, perhaps, young "dinophiles" in search of a vocation. Illus.
