This lavishly illustrated volume is the first authoritative dinosaur book in the style of a field guide. World-renowned dinosaur illustrator and researcher Gregory Paul provides comprehensive visual and textual coverage of the great Mesozoic animals that gave rise to the living dinosaurs, the birds. Incorporating the new discoveries and research that are radically transforming what we know about dinosaurs, this book is distinguished both by its scientific accuracy and the quality and quantity of its illustrations. It presents thorough descriptions of more than 735 dinosaur species and features more than 600 color and black-and-white images, including unique skeletal drawings, "life" studies, and scenic views--illustrations that depict the full range of dinosaurs, from small, feathered creatures to whale-sized supersauropods.

Heavily illustrated species accounts of the major dinosaur groups are preceded by an extensive introduction that covers dinosaur history and biology, the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs, the origin of birds, and the history of dinosaur paleontology--and that also gives a taste of what it might be like to travel back to the time of the dinosaurs.

The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs is a must-have for anyone who loves dinosaurs, from the amateur enthusiast to the professional paleontologist.

• The first authoritative field guide to dinosaurs
• Covers more than 735 species
• Beautiful, large-format volume
• Lavishly illustrated throughout, with more than 600 color and black-and-white drawings and figures, including:
  
  
  • More than 130 color life studies, including scenic views
  • Close to 450 skeletal, skull, head, and muscle drawings
  • 8 color paleo-distribution maps
  • Color timeline
• Describes anatomy, physiology, locomotion, reproduction, and growth of dinosaurs, as well as the origin of birds and the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs

The literature on Chinese fossil vertebrates is extremely difficult for Western scholars to assimilate and interpret. In part, this is because much of that literature is in Chinese, and few useful reviews exist in Western languages. Yet China has an extensive vertebrate fossil record, one that plays a key role in understanding the evolution of vertebrates. Spencer Lucas gives an up-to-date review and synthesis of the Chinese vertebrate fossil record that will greatly facilitate an understanding of and further research into this outstanding fossil record. The book provides the reader with a comprehensive, chronologically ordered review of China's vertebrate fossil record. It also presents a history of vertebrate paleontological studies in China and an entrée to some important issues of systematics, evolutionary history, paleoecology, taphonomy, and functional anatomy best elucidated by China's fossils. This volume should therefore become an indispensable part of the library of any student of vertebrate evolution.