Showing all 7 results
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Field guide to Mesozoic birds and other winged dinosaurs.
Artist/Author: Martyniuk, Matthew P.$55.00 Add to cartAn interesting companion guide to palaeo-birdwatching including information on bird evolution and comparative anatomy and biology of the first birds.
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Moa: the life and death of New Zealand’s legendary bird.
Artist/Author: Berentson, Quinn.$55.00 Add to cart2013 Winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize. Perhaps the most unusual and unique family of birds that ever lived, the moa were a clan of feathered monsters that developed in isolation for many, many millions of years. They became extinct reasonably quickly after the arrival of the Maori, and were a distant memory by the time European explorers arrived. So the discovery and identification of their bones in the 1840s was a worldwide sensation, claimed by many to be the zoological find of the century. This book begins by recounting the story of discovery, which was characterised by an unbelievable amount of controversy and intrigue. Since then there has been an unbroken chain of new discoveries, culminating with intriguing revelations in recent years about the Moa’s biology, that have come to light through DNA testing and radio-dating. This is a fascinating and important book that richly recounts the life and death of New Zealand’s strangest bird.
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Living dinosaurs: the evolutionary history of modern birds.
Artist/Author: Dyke, Gareth and Gary W. Kaiser.$143.00 Add to cartOffers a snapshot of our current understanding of the origin and evolution of birds. After slumbering for more than a century, avian palaeontology has been awakened by startling new discoveries on almost every continent. Controversies about whether dinosaurs had real feathers or whether birds were related to dinosaurs have been swept away and replaced by new and more difficult questions: How old is the avian lineage? How did birds learn to fly? Which birds survived the great extinction that ended the Mesozoic Era and how did the avian genome evolve? Answers to these questions may help us understand how the different kinds of living birds are related to one another and how they evolved into their current niches. More importantly, they may help us understand what we need to do to help them survive the dramatic impacts of human activity on the planet.
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Feathered dinosaurs: the origins of birds.
Artist/Author: Long, John and Peter Schouten.$50.00 Add to cartNew fossil evidence has recently shown that not all the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. It’s a revelation that has profoundly changed the way we perceive the natural world and has given us a new understanding about the origins of birds. We now believe that all living birds are descendants of certain predatory dinosaurs, the theropods. Indeed, many theropods are preserved with feathers as part of their skin. The transition from small, feathered dinosaur to primitive flying bird is now accepted as an anatomically seamless evolutionary event.
This book dramatically brings to life all the known groups of dinosaurs that bore feathers. Through the eyes of one of the world’s most acclaimed natural history artists, Peter Schouten, their peculiar physical traits are matched with living creatures to develop a series of imaginative life paintings of this fascinating extinct group. The text explains each of the steps in going from dinosaur to bird, and how flight evolved.
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Dodo: the bird behind the legend.
Artist/Author: Grihault, Alan.$55.00 Add to cartThis book allows the reader to examine various eyewitness writings, drawings, paintings and skeletal remains, which depict the Dodo as it actually was, and helps us to understand how it was driven to extinction. It also traces what happened after the final demise of the bird, and how worldwide evidence was pieced together to provide a reasonable idea of how the Dodo lived and died.
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The Dodo: the bird that drew the short straw.
Artist/Author: Den Hengst, Jan.$50.00 Add to cartThis detailed account of the Dodo features contemporary accounts, paintings and drawings.
Index
Foreword
the bird who drew the short straw
A bird in wonderland
Ninety fatal years
A failed frontier
Thieving monkeys and slavering pigs
The ship’s logs
Cut and paste
The tale of a castaway
Start and progress
Imaginative representation
Learned gleanings
A trustworthy account
A dodo turned cuckoo?
Slow and stupid
The world of Pliny
Savery’s animal kingdom
Roelant Savery
Wunderkammer
Seventeenth Century pictures
Misshapen fatsos
The dodo of Adriaen van der Venne
Peckers, steppers and scratchers
A stuffed dodo as model?
Enlightening contributions
An eyewitness
Far travels of an islander
Watercolour by Cornelis Saftleven
The picture book of De Quade van Ravesteyn
Artists with and without talent
A tiny mark
A handful of bones and an egg
A controversial egg
Archimedes in Edinburgh
Fat or lean?
An elegant phantom in the family
A third species of dodo
Markies Hachisuka
Production line
Questionable sightings
The reconstruction
Colours and sizes
Bibliography
Illustrations -
Feathered dragons: studies on the transition from dinosaurs to birds.
Artist/Author: Currie, Philip J. et al.$75.00 Add to cartMeat-eating theropod dinosaurs have been recognized as potential ancestors of birds since the 19th century, but it was not until the 1960s that work on Deinonychus revealed the startling similarities between dinosaurs and birds. With each new small theropod find the ties became stronger, until the discovery of Sinosauropteryx a dinosaur with feathers. Though not all scientists accept the concept of birds being phylogenetically nested within the Dinosauria, others are now focusing on the evolution of feathers and avian flight. This book presents 15 new pieces of research, including the first detailed description of Bambiraptor, a remarkable new specimen from Montana.
