Steve Brusatte Collection 2 Books Set (The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs)

Applies to BOTH booksI have vicariously kept in touch with vertebrate paleontology since graduating in biology/geology around the time the double helix was announced, but my main postgrad interest was micropaleontology, which would you believe it led into a career of museum based computing.What I had not appreciated was the advances which had been made during those 50+ years resulting from the employment of new techniques of looking at the fossils, and analysing the results, and also the vast number of new discoveries in new locations which had been made in that time. Yes, an awareness of feathered dinosaurs of (mainly) Chinese origin, had crept in, and even at the time of my degree it was suggested that birds were the only survivors of the dinosaurs. And our then acquaintance with the evolution of mammals had been restricted to considering a single lineage of the horse with increase in size accompanied by loss of toes. There was no consideration of populations and their response to changing environments, indeed environmental geology was also in its relative childhood!

Two physically smaller books! Not what I expected. Now I regret buying them.