The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time

by Unknown Author

The landscape of southwestern Wyoming around the ghost town of Fossil is beautiful but harsh; a dry, high mountain desert with cool nights and long, cold winters inhabited by a sparse mountain desert community. But during the early Eocene, more than fifty million years ago, it was a subtropical lake, surrounded by volcanoes and forests and teeming with life. Buried within the sun-baked limestone is spectacular evidence of the lush vegetation and plentiful fauna of the ancient past, a transitional ecosystem giving us clues to how North America recovered from a great extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs and the majority of all species on the planet.


Paleontologists have been conducting excavations at Fossil Butte for more than 150 years, and with The Lost World of Fossil Lake , one of the world’s leading experts on the fossils from this spectacular locality takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of the discovery and exploration of the site. Deftly mixing incredible color photographs of the remarkable fossils uncovered at the site with an explanation of their evolutionary significance, Grande presents an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of the site, its treasures, and what we’ve learned from them. Grande presents a broad range of fossilized organisms from Fossil Lake—from single-celled algae to palm trees to crocodiles—and together they make this long-extinct community come to life in all its diversity and splendor. A field guide and atlas round out the book, enabling readers to identify and classify the majority of the known fossils from the site.


Lavishly produced in full color, The Lost World of Fossil Lake is a stunning reminder of the intellectual and physical beauty of scientific investigation—and a breathtaking window onto our planet’s long-lost past.

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

Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

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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.