A short book

The Mesozoic, in chapters

The age of dinosaurs as a few evenings of reading, kept honest about what the bones say and what the artists guessed.

1. 01 What is a dinosaur? The word covers less, and more, than the movies suggest.
2. 02 The Triassic Dawn How the dinosaurs started small, stayed modest, and outlived the competition.
3. 03 Jurassic Giants When Pangaea split, the land grew lush, and the largest animals ever to walk the Earth came into being.
4. 04 The Cretaceous Peak For 79 million years the world split into separate kingdoms, and dinosaurs grew stranger and grander in every one.
5. 05 The Day It Ended An asteroid, a winter without sun, and the lineage that refused to vanish.

Prefer to browse? Try the deep-time scrubber, the size face-off, or the full A–Z index.