The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time

by Lance Grande

Excellent Book

Genres: Science, Palaeontology, Nonfiction, History, Natural History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Mhd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, outstanding, superb, exemplary, and so on! Both the format and content are exquisite. First, the book itself is a book-lover's book: heavy, solidly produced with high quality paper and oodles upon oodles of high resolution illustrations. It is very, very difficult to open the book without hitting on a page with an illustration. All captions are thorough and just as well written as the text. The writing is clear and easy to follow. Grande's passion for his work shows in every paragraph, page after page and chapter after chapter.

The content is well organized and very interesting. But, then, I like dinosaurs and geology in general anyway. The beginning chapters on the history of the area and on how the fossils are quarried and the history of that process were especially interesting. The final chapters' discussion of unanswered questions and debates about the science were also super.

This is a remarkable book and easily the most memorable book I've found all summer long. I visit Utah frequently and I hope we can make a side trip to Fossil Butte next trip.

[Tracy Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book if you enjoy history and fossils. Amazing fossils in it.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visually spectacular, with excellent photos of the slab fossils quarried from a corner of southwestern Wyoming. Grande's narrative explains the context--that is, how these fossils happened to come into existence 52 million years ago and be preserved into our time. The writing isn't colorful or given anecdotes, but it gets the job done.