Book description

Discover the lost world of the Antarctic dinosaurs and how its secrets have been unearthed.

Dinosaurs of Darkness opens a doorway to a fascinating former world that existed in Australia between 100 million and 120 million years ago. At that time Australia was far south of its present location and joined to Antarctica. Over the past two decades, scientists have determined that dinosaurs lived in this polar region. The way we have come to know about this lost world---so different from any that exists on earth today---makes for a fascinating story. Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich, who played crucial roles in this discovery, describe their efforts to collect the fossils indispensable to our knowledge of this realm. They take us inside the laboratories where scientists worked to unlock the secrets of these fossils and to reconstruct the environment in which these dinosaurs lived. And they report on the activities of hundreds of other individuals who contributed to this research. This journey of scientific adventure is full of the ambiguities of life: it begins with one destination in mind and ends at another, arrived at by a most roundabout route, down byways and back from dead ends. Dinosaurs of darkness is an absorbing, personal account of the way scientific research is actually conducted and how hard it is to mine the knowledge of the remarkable life of the past.

About the Author

Professor Pat Vickers-Rich holds a chair in Palaeontology at Monash University, where she lectures in the Earth Sciences department. Dr Tom Rich is curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at Museum Victoria.

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