THE LIBRARY
The latest book releases for curious minds
THE LIT TLE BOOK OF PAL AEONTOLOGY
A POCKET GUIDE TO OUR FOSSILISED PAST
AUTHOR RASHA BARRAGE
PUBLISHER OCTOPUS PUBLISHING
PRICE
£6.99 / $13.95
RELEASE OUT NOW
In an early scene of the 1993 classic dinosaur movie JurassicPark, a palaeontologist shoots a lead slug into the ground at a fossil site in the South Dakota badlands. After a few seconds, an image of a dinosaur skeleton appears on a monitor as he declares: “A few more years development and we won’t even have to dig anymore.” At the time, and to the majority of us without a PhD, this sounded like another wild yet fun crumb of science fiction in the Jurassic Parkuniverse. But 30 years later, microcomputed tomography scanning has advanced to the point where we can look inside rocks and fossils to make highly detailed three-dimensional images of the fossilised bones and structures within. And because none of the How ItWorksteam are close friends with dinosaur professionals or moonlighting at dig sites around the world, this fact was a surprise to us when we encountered it in The Little BookofPalaeontology – as is much of this pithy introduction to a vocation that most of us have little to no experience of.