The American horseshoe crab that comes ashore on the East Coast in vast numbers to mate and nest is much the same creature that haunted the coast before the time of the dinosaurs. It is among the world's most intensely studied marine invertebrates, critical to our understanding of many groups of organisms, both modern and extinct, and crucial to the ecology of large estuaries such as the Delaware Bay. Some stocks of this great survivor, whose ancestors made it through the mass extinction some 286 million years ago, have been severely depleted today because of overfishing and habitat destruction.

Carl N. Shuster, Jr., H. Jane Brockmann, and Robert B. Barlow are at the forefront of research on Limulus polyphemus, and in this book they bring together twenty scientists who have worked on all aspects of horseshoe crab biology to compile the first fully detailed, comprehensive view of the species. An indispensable resource, the volume describes the horseshoe crab's behavior, natural history, and ecology; its anatomy, physiology, distribution, development, and life cycle; the puzzle of its immune system; and its present management and future conservation.

A lively account of how dinosaurs became a symbol of American power and prosperity and gripped the popular imagination during the Gilded Age, when their fossil remains were collected and displayed in museums financed by North America’s wealthiest business tycoons.

Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films.

Assembling the Dinosaur follows dinosaur fossils from the field to the museum and into the commercial culture of North America’s Gilded Age. Business tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made common cause with vertebrate paleontologists to capitalize on the widespread appeal of dinosaurs, using them to project American exceptionalism back into prehistory. Learning from the show-stopping techniques of P. T. Barnum, museums exhibited dinosaurs to attract, entertain, and educate the public. By assembling the skeletons of dinosaurs into eye-catching displays, wealthy industrialists sought to cement their own reputations as generous benefactors of science, showing that modern capitalism could produce public goods in addition to profits. Behind the scenes, museums adopted corporate management practices to control the movement of dinosaur bones, restricting their circulation to influence their meaning and value in popular culture.

Tracing the entwined relationship of dinosaurs, capitalism, and culture during the Gilded Age, Lukas Rieppel reveals the outsized role these giant reptiles played during one of the most consequential periods in American history.

A time-traveling field guide to the ancient version of Big Bend National Park.

The sheer beauty of Big Bend National Park, along the shores of the Rio Grande in west Texas, never fails to astonish. Yet what lies beneath this natural treasure may be even more extraordinary than what meets the eye. Hidden in the rocks of Big Bend are the remains of giants: toothy sea lizards, enormous flying reptiles, and dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals of Big Bend is a field guide to what once was. Inspired by the latest research, Cindi Sirois Collins and Asher Elbein imagine what it was like to walk among the plants and animals whose fossil remains tell the story of evolution and geological transformation in this singular landscape. We glimpse the drama of Big Bend’s rugged landscape in creation—the desert’s emergence from retreating oceans and volcanic eruptions. Immersive vignettes introduce dinosaurs, giant fish, and saber-toothed cats. And the history of discovery in the park proves a gripping tale, as paleontologists sifted major scientific insights from the soils, rocks, and riverbeds. Complete with vivid illustrations, this is a wholly original sensory and narrative experience that will deepen any reader’s knowledge and sense of wonder.

For at least half a million years, people have been doing some very strange things with fossils. Long before a few seventeenth-century minds started to decipher their true, organic nature, fossils had been eaten, dropped in goblets of wine, buried with the dead, and adorned bodies. What triggered such curious behavior was the belief that some fossils could cure illness, protect against being poisoned, ease the passage into the afterlife, ward off evil spirits, and even kill those who were just plain annoying. But above all, to our early prehistoric ancestors, fossils were the very stuff of artistic inspiration. Drawing on archaeology, mythology, and folklore, Ken McNamara takes us on a journey through prehistory with these curious stones, and he explores humankind’s unending quest for the meaning of fossils.

Fossil Invertebrates introduces readers to the biosphere as it was hundreds of millions of years ago, when seas teemed with animal forms both familiar and strange: ammonites and corals, mollusks and sponges, crinoids and trilobites. On land, terrestrial forms were beginning to make their mark, leaving behind traces such as burrows and track ways and other fossil evidence of the important transition to life on land. The plates in this book capture the incredibly detailed impressions and casts of ancient life, contrasting them with forms, such as the horseshoe crab and the chambered nautilus, that persist today virtually unchanged.

The shells and hard exoskeletons of invertebrates make them excellent candidates for fossilization, and the amateur fossil collectors are more likely to uncover an invertebrate fossil than any other kind. The fossilized remains of invertebrates dominate university collections and museum holdings worldwide and their study continues to yield important insights into the nature of evolutionary change and the impact of climate change on biodiversity, as great explosions of diversity were succeeded by mass extinctions. Paul D. Taylor and David N. Lewis, both of the Natural History Museum, London, have written a comprehensive and accessible resource, one that provides undergraduates and amateur fossil enthusiasts with a means to understand and interpret this rich fossil record.

Fossils, far from being mere dry bones, provide the key to understanding the stuff of history: past climates, evolution, and extinction. In this lively introduction, Richard Fortey offers an engaging and lucid explanation of how fossils are a product of our endlessly evolving habitat. The story begins with the Precambrian era, more than 600 million years ago. As Fortey traces the history of life from the dawn of the Precambrian to the present, he paints a vivid picture of the emergence of the plants and animals that we would recognize today. Unlike so many works on fossils that focus on dinosaurs, this book covers a broad range of animals and plants and does justice to the numerical superiority of invertebrate fossils.

The scope of the book is wide, including not only a history of paleontology but a review of those parts of general geology that are needed to appreciate the wealth of information contained in the fossil record: stratigraphy, measurements of paleotemperatures and radiometric ages, turbidites, reefs, sandstones, and so on. But the main emphasis of the book is on what paleontology is really about, how the paleontologist tries to figure out the ways in which fossil animals lived, and how geological processes such as plate tectonics have interacted with the history of life.

Fossils attempts to survey the contemporary paleontological scene in order to communicate the excitement of investigating the past. A primary goal of the book is to inspire and instruct the amateur fossil collector; hence, the specimens illustrated—many of which are presented in full color—are ones that are not too difficult for the amateur to collect. To aid the neophyte, the author has appended notes on the occurrence, significance, and preparation of each specimen. Of particular interest to the amateur are the discussions on how to collect fossils and on the economic and practical importance of fossils and their enclosing sediments. In striking a perfect balance between detail and generalization, Richard Fortey has written a book that will appeal to amateur and professional alike.

This revised and expanded edition of Oregon Fossils includes a record of all known fossils in Oregon going back 400 million years, along with collecting localities by county, age, rock formation, and published source. The book also provides a geologic overview of the state, from ocean beaches to the high desert, from the Blue Mountains to the Siskiyous.

Unique among fossil field guides, Oregon Fossils includes both specimen identification and interesting notes about their discovery, naming, and conservation. The narrative is sprinkled with biographical sketches of paleontologists who have contributed to the state’s fossil record, and the text is richly illustrated with photographs, line drawings, charts, and maps. A complete bibliography lists full citations to fossil material. The only single volume that provides Oregon’s fossil record and history, Oregon Fossils is a well-written, well-organized guide. It is an excellent reference for classroom and library use, for researchers, and for private collectors and hobbyists.

For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge.

Throughout the four hundred thousand years that humanity has been collecting fossils, sea urchin fossils, or echinoids, have continually been among the most prized, from the Paleolithic era, when they decorated flint axes, to today, when paleobiologists study them for clues to the earth’s history. 

In The Star-Crossed Stone, Kenneth J. McNamara, an expert on fossil echinoids, takes readers on an incredible fossil hunt, with stops in history, paleontology, folklore, mythology, art, religion, and much more. Beginning with prehistoric times, when urchin fossils were used as jewelry, McNamara reveals how the fossil crept into the religious and cultural lives of societies around the world—the roots of the familiar five-pointed star, for example, can be traced to the pattern found on urchins. But McNamara’s vision is even broader than that: using our knowledge of early habits of fossil collecting, he explores the evolution of the human mind itself, drawing striking conclusions about humanity’s earliest appreciation of beauty and the first stirrings of artistic expression. Along the way, the fossil becomes a nexus through which we meet brilliant eccentrics and visionary archaeologists and develop new insights into topics as seemingly disparate as hieroglyphics, Beowulf, and even church organs.

An idiosyncratic celebration of science, nature, and human ingenuity, The Star-Crossed Stone is as charming and unforgettable as the fossil at its heart.

Lavishly illustrated with full-color geological maps, tables of strata, geological cross-sections, photographs, and fossil illustrations from the archives of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Geological Society, the London Natural History Museum, and others, Strata provides the first complete presentation of the revolutionary work of nineteenth-century geologist William Smith, the so-called father of English geology. It illustrates the story of his career, from apprentice to surveyor for hire and fossil collector, from his 1799 geological map of Bath and table of strata to his groundbreaking 1815 geological strata map, and from his imprisonment for debt to his detailed stratigraphical county maps.
 
This sumptuous volume begins with an introduction by Douglas Palmer that places Smith’s work in the context of earlier, concurrent, and subsequent ideas regarding the structure and natural processes of the earth, geographical mapping, and biostratigraphical theories. The book is then organized into four parts, each beginning with four sheets from Smith’s hand-colored, 1815 strata map, accompanied by related geological cross-sections and county maps, and followed by fossil illustrations by Smith contemporary James Sowerby, all organized by strata. Essays between each section explore the aims of Smith’s work and its application in the fields of mining, agriculture, cartography and hydrology. Strata concludes with reflections on Smith’s later years as an itinerant geologist and surveyor, plagiarism by a rival, receipt of the first Wollaston Medal in recognition of his achievements, and the influence of his geological mapping and biostratigraphical theories on the sciences—all of which culminated in the establishment of the modern geological timescale.
 
Featuring a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, Strata is a glorious testament to the lasting geological and illustrative genius of William Smith, a collection as colossal and awe-inspiring as the layers of the Earth themselves.