The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Sunday Times Bestseller, The Untold Story of a Lost World

by Steve Brusatte

NESTLED WITHIN THE LEAFY STREETS of New Haven, Connecticut, on the northern fringes of the Yale University campus, there is a shrine. The Great Hall of Dinosaurs at Yale’s Peabody Museum may not bill itself as a place of spiritual pilgrimage, but that’s sure what it feels like to me. I get a shiver, as when I walked into Catholic mass as a child. It’s not a normal shrine—no statues of deities, flickering candles, or the hint of incense. It’s also not particularly magnificent, at least from the outside, tucked away inside a fairly nondescript brick building that blends in with the rest of the university’s lecture halls. But it houses relics that, to me, are as sacred as those you’ll find in most any religious shrine: dinosaurs. To me, there is nowhere better, anywhere on the planet, to go and immerse yourself in the wonder of the prehistoric world.