The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World

 Steve Brusatte, author

© 2018 William Morrow/Harper Collins

404pp (with index)

©Bruce Kemp 2025

Making science entertaining is an art few people master although they think they do. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of their Lost World by Steve Brustatte is not one of those books. Instead, it’s well worth reading because it not only entertains but educates the reader.

In the 1950s when I was first becoming aware of the broader world around me, I fell hook-line-and-sinker for dinosaurs too. At the time, there wasn’t an awful lot of information geared to adolescents on the subject. Yes, we had dinosaur books. I scoured the shelves of the bookmobile that visited our school twice a month, but the offerings were meagre and dull with a lot of scholarly black and white sketches showing side views of each beast. As inspiring as mugshots. Despite borrowing most of these books, I never read them. I just looked at the pictures.

Then, in 1960, Hollywood released the movie every dinosaur loving boy growing up in the 1950s had been waiting for. Dinosaurus gave us the original Jurassic Park, complete with slow moving stop-motion models jerking across the screen thirty-three years before CGI brought another T-rex to life with terrifying authority.

You can see Dinosaurus yourself. It’s a great beer and popcorn movie for hot summer nights. It is the story of a boy, Julio, and his dinosaur. The movie follows two dinosaurs, a T-rex and a Brontosaurus, along with a Neanderthal (slightly out of sinc with the historical timeline) after they are awakened from their frozen slumber by a lightning strike. One of the beasties is the T-rex which threatens an unnamed Caribbean Island. It only eats one character – a harmless old Irish drunk – which loses out to the lawyer munching scene in Spielberg’s nineties epic. Fun to watch, do yourself a favour and Google it.

Just the other day I realized how important dinosaurs were to my own evolution and the intellectual development of most adolescent boys. We learned to pronounce our first multisyllabic words by playing with plastic dinosaurs. This was our gender’s introduction to learning. Girls took a different path to building their knowledge base. There hasn’t been a five-year-old boy, in my acquaintance, who couldn’t rhyme off Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor or Stegosaurus

Since then, I drifted away from paleontology into dealing with real life meat eaters in the publishing world. I would have given up just about anything if a book like The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of their Lost Worldhad been available.

Brusatte is probably the biggest dinosaur nerd I’ve encountered with the exception of my nephew Alex. Not only that, Brusatte not Alex, is a superb writer weaving a complex story covering roughly 500-million years.

To bring his story to life Brusatte understands the necessity for the reader to have a clear vision of our planet’s greater timeline and its geology. He’s an expert in placing the reader on that timeline.

The timeline is developed around three geological eras: Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. These are further subdivided into six periods, the best known of these is the Jurassic. Rather than a chalkboard spreadsheet of the periods and how long they lasted, Brusatte punctuates his tale with detailed scientific descriptions the five life-ending catastrophes that formed today’s world.

Brusatte begins his monograph with The Golden Age of Discovery. This chapter explores the old saw of a tree falling in the forest, except in this case it is an entire ecosystem going extinct with someone finally there to hear it.

He traverses the evolutionary paths that led to bigger and stronger dinosaurs. Occasionally he branches off from the saurian glitterati to dabble in dinosaur’s skin colour and feathering. Both newly considered in the past thirty years. He also places each species and subspecies geographically on a global basis so little boys know not to go looking for T-rex in the wilds of Newfoundland.

Throughout the Golden Age, the writer works tirelessly to identify the superstars of the global paleontological community – the Indianna Jones’ who are actually doing the digging – and what they went through to achieve their goals. Brusatte covers not only the historical timeline of dinosaur discoveries, but he gives the reader a glimpse into the organization, political games and personal coprolite-slinging feuds between collectors, museums and the bone hunters themselves over the years.

Names like Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, Alfred Sherwood Romer, Paul Sereno, Darla Zelenitsky, Jingmai O’Connor, Junchang Lü, Octávio Mateus and Sara Burch continually pop up throughout the narrative. Then of course there is the man who set the scientific world on it proverbial ear, Walter Alvarez.

Alvarez was the scientist, in the 1970s, who said the dinosaurs were killed off by a giant asteroid hitting the Yucatan Peninsula 66-million years ago. AKA the Cretaceous extinction.

Across the pages of this book, Brusatte travels from Argentina to Poland, from New Mexico to Transylvania and China to the Isle of Skye making it a true global conspiracy of dinosaur scientists.

Extinctions play a central role in the story. The first was the tectonic upheaval ending the period. “If we’d been standing in the same spot [a Polish quarry] 252-million years ago, during a slice of time geologists call the Permian Period, our surrounding would have been barely recognizable… No birds in the sky or mice scurrying at our feet, no flowery shrubs to scratch us up or mosquitoes to feed on our cuts… We still would have been sweating, though, because it was hot and unbearably humid, probably more insufferable than Miami in the middle of the summer.”

Then, at the end of the Permian Period, the earth itself began to bubble, boil and trouble.  Lava flowed from ruptures in the earth’s surface covering large portions of Siberia and Asia. Along with the lava, poisonous gasses flooded the atmosphere turning the oceans acidic. Rapid temperature increases caused by greenhouse gasses baked the planet. “It was the biggest episode of mass death in the History of our planet. Somewhere around 90% of all species disappeared.”

This paved the way for the dinosaurs, although they were still a long way off. First life had to re-evolve.

Before there were dinosaurs there were Proto-dinosaurs and other species. Going back to the first life on Earth, there were always living creatures in one form or another. It was the Proto dinosaur that evolved into the characters schoolboys love today. Then disaster struck again. In describing the mass extinctions Brusatte proves the mettle of his imagination and power of his pen. You can’t read about the death of the dinosaurs without a chill running down your spine because you know it could happen again.

“It was the worst day in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence that undid more than 150-million years of evolution and set life on a new course.” The die-off was massive. Entire herds of T-rex and Stegosaurus perished together. It was Brusatte and his colleagues who found the evidence of this in the last half of the twentieth century.

Brusatte’s writing style is highly readable. He writes with a twinkle in his eye that doesn’t downplay the scholarly understanding he is passing on here. Definitely on my read again list. – BK