The Story of Birds An Evolutionary History of the Dinosaurs that Live Among Us

About this book

From the bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, this is the engrossing story of the dinosaurs that live among us.

Billions of birds share the planet with us. With their flamboyant plumage and joyous dawn serenades, many of them are impossible to miss. But how did they get here, how did they break the bounds of Earth and begin to fly, and how does their legacy shape our world?

In delightfully energetic prose, expert palaeontologist Steve Brusatte takes us through their 150-million-year history, from their origins among small carnivorous dinosaurs to the 10,000-plus species that thrive today. Along the way, we meet fantastic birds from all around the world, some known only through fossils. There are elephant birds that stand as high as a basketball hoop and lay eggs as big as watermelons; demon ducks that weigh more than cows; aeroplane-sized seabirds that soar the world's thermals; and predatory penguins the size of gorillas.

This deep-dive into the evolutionary origins of birds reveals them to be some of the best adapted and most fined-tuned animals to ever exist in our world. Lively, majestic and full of wonder, The Story of Birds will ensure you never see birds the same way again.

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Biography

Professor Steve Brusatte is a palaeontologist on the faculty of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He grew up in the Midwestern United States and has a BSc in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago, an MSc in Palaeobiology from the University of Bristol, and a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in New York. Steve is widely recognised as one of the leading palaeontologists of his generation. He has written over two hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers during his twenty years of research in the field, named and described over a dozen new species of dinosaurs and mammals, and led ground-breaking studies on how dinosaurs rose to dominance and went extinct, and how birds evolved from carnivorous dinosaurs closely related to Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. His book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into over twenty languages, and he is the science consultant for the Jurassic World film franchise and BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs.