Dinosaurs of Darkness: In Search of the Lost Polar World

by Thomas H. Rich, Patricia Vickers-Rich

Dinosaurs of Darkness opens a doorway to a fascinating former world, between 100 million and 120 million years ago, when Australia was far south of its present location and joined to Antarctica. Dinosaurs lived in this polar region.


How were the polar dinosaurs discovered? What do we now know about them? Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich, who have played crucial roles in their discovery, describe how they and others collected the fossils indispensable to our knowledge of this realm and how painstaking laboratory work and analyses continue to unlock the secrets of the polar dinosaurs. This scientific adventure makes for a fascinating story: it begins with one destination in mind and ends at another, arrived at by a most roundabout route, down byways and back from dead ends. Dinosaurs of Darkness is a personal, absorbing account of the way scientific research is actually conducted and how hard and rewarding it is to mine the knowledge of this remarkable life of the past.


The award-winning first edition has been thoroughly updated with the latest discoveries and interpretations, along with over 100 new photographs and charts, many in color.

Genres: Dinosaurs, Palaeontology, Nonfiction, Science, History

332 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad I ignored some of the more negative reviews of this book; it was excellent! There's plenty of information on the specimens gathered, including drawings and photos, and the story of how they were gathered is coupled with the different hypotheses of how the fossils fit into the history of life.

[ccoelophysis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not very well written (two authors and it doesn't indicate who is speaking when), but it's an interesting account of the discovery of dinosaurs in Australia. Don't expect to learn much about the dinosaurs themselves though.

[Kevin Orrman-Rossiter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting first hand account of the authors, both professional paleontologists, search for early marsupial fossils and their subsequent dinosaur fossil discoveries in Victoria (Australia) in the 1980s and 1990s. Great window into how science happens - than the dinosaurs of Australia themselves.