'The past, ' declared the celebrated palaeobotanist Albert Seward, 'seizes upon us with its shadowy hand and holds us to listen to its tale.'. This book is the tale of our world's past - and future - as revealed by plants. Newly found clues in the fossil record show plants to be powerful agents of change, moulding the Earth's climate and affecting the evolutionary path of life over the immensity of geological time. They tell of how giant insects could...

Like a star chart this volume orientates the reader to the key issues and debates in Pacific and Australasian biogeography, palaeoecology and human ecology. A feature of this collection is the diversity of approaches ranging from interpretation of the biogeographic significance of plant and animal distributional patterns, pollen analysis from peats and lake sediments to discern Quaternary climate change, explanation of the patterns of faunal extinction...

An illustrated record book of theropod facts and figures--from the biggest to the fastest to the smartest. This compendium features more than 3,000 records, covers some 750 theropod species, and includes a wealth of illustrations ranging from diagrams and technical drawings to full-color reconstructions of specimens.