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.

Formato	Tapa dura
Número de Páginas	432
Lenguaje	Inglés
Editorial	University of Chicago Press
Fecha de Publicación	2013-06-14
Dimensiones	10.27" x 8.42" x 1.38" pulgadas
Letra Grande	No
Con Ilustraciones	Si
Temas	Prehistórico, Aspectos de Ciencia/Tecnología, Wyoming
Premios	PROSE 2013 (Winner)

Grande, Lance

Lance Grande has been doing paleontological fieldwork in the Fossil Butte Member of southwestern Wyoming for more than thirty years and is one of the world's foremost authorities on this amazing locality. He is also a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, where he conducts research on fishes, paleontology, geology, and evolutionary biology. He is the award-winning author of more than one hundred books and scientific articles, including The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Scenes from Deep Time and Gems and Gemstones: Timeless Natural Beauty of the Mineral World, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Gems and Gemstones won the 2009 PROSE Award in Earth Sciences, and in 2012 he received the Robert H. Gibbs Award for an Outstanding Body of Published Work in Systematic Ichthyology. He is a Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois. At the University of Chicago he also serves on the Council of the Graham School, and on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology. He is a board member for the Chicago Council on Science and Technology, and serves on the Executive Steering Committee for The Encyclopedia of Life.