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

The area is so heavily eroded today, and so little disturbed by buildings and roads and other human nuisances that cover up fossils, that the dinosaurs are relatively easy to find, at least compared to so many other parts of the world where we hike around for days just praying to find anything, even just a tooth. The very first discoveries here were made by cowpokes or other locals, and it wasn’t until the 1940s that scientists began to collect, study, and describe fossils from Ischigualasto, then still another few decades until intensive expeditions were launched. The first major collecting trips were led by one of the giants of twentieth-century paleontology, the Harvard professor Alfred Sherwood Romer, the man who wrote the textbook that I still use to teach my graduate students in Edinburgh. During his first trip, in 1958, Romer was already sixty-four years old and regarded as a living legend, yet there he was driving a rickety car through the badlands because he had a hunch that Ischigualasto would be the next big frontier.