The Dinosauria Second Edition.THE DINOSAURIA Second Edition DAVID B. WEISHAMPEL, PETER DODSON, AND HALSZKA OSMOSLSKA, EDS. Revised and updated, this opus provides a comprehensive overview of dinosaur paleontology. Since this book's original publication in 1990, a wealth of new data, reflected here, have described nearly 70 percent more genera than were known before. This is a scholarly text that comprehensively addresses dinosaur reproduction, biogeography Biogeography A synthetic discipline that describes the distributions of living and fossil species of plants and animals across the Earth's surface as consequences of ecological and evolutionary processes. , fossilization fos·sil·ize v. fos·sil·ized, fos·sil·iz·ing, fos·sil·iz·es v.tr. 1. To convert into a fossil. 2. To make outmoded or inflexible with time; antiquate. v.intr. , paleoecology pa·le·o·e·col·o·gy n. The branch of ecology that deals with the interaction between ancient organisms and their environment. , thermoregulation Thermoregulation The processes by which many animals actively maintain the temperature of part or all of their body within a specified range in order to stabilize or optimize temperature-sensitive physiological processes. , extinction, and systematics. Chapters on individual dinosaur taxa, including the Mesozoic predecessors of birds, bolster these subjects. As a point of reference, each chapter on a taxon taxon (pl. taxa), in biology, a term used to denote any group or rank in the classification of organisms, e.g., class, order, family. includes a table summarizing the animals' discovery, classification, geographic and stratigraphic occurrences, and ages. The text was penned by 43 scholars from around the world. The volume's bibliography is nearly a book itself, providing hundreds of citations for reference and further reading. U CA Pr, 2004, 861 p., b&w illus., hardcover, $95.00. |
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