The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World: The Definitive Dinosaur Encyclopedia with Stunning Illustrations, Embark on a Prehistoric Quest!

by Steve Brusatte

IF YOU’RE WALKING down Broadway in New York City and happen to catch a gap between the skyscrapers, you can see straight across the Hudson River to New Jersey. You’ll notice that the Jersey side of the river is defined by a steep cliff of drab brown rock, about a hundred feet high, studded with vertical cracks. Locals refer to it as the Palisades. During the summer it can be almost unrecognizable, engulfed by a dense forest of trees and bushes that somehow cling to the sheer slopes. Commuter towns like Jersey City and Fort Lee are perched on top of the cliff, and the western end of the George Washington Bridge is built deep into it, an ideal anchor for the world’s busiest overwater crossing. If you wanted to, you could walk along the Palisades for about fifty miles, from where it begins in Staten Island and extends along the Hudson to where it juts into upstate New York. Millions of people look at this cliff every week. Hundreds of thousands of people live on it. Few realize that it is a remnant of those ancient volcanic eruptions that tore apart Pangea and ushered in the Age of Dinosaurs. The Palisades is what geologists refer to as a sill—an intrusion of magma that pokes its way in between two layers of rock far underground, but then hardens into stone before it can erupt as lava. Sills are part of the internal plumbing system of volcanoes. Before they harden into rock, they are pipes, which transport magma underground. Sometimes they are conduits that bring magma to the...