“The holes in front of us were fossilized tracks, huge ones. Dinosaur t...” — Steve Brusatte Quote

“The holes in front of us were fossilized tracks, huge ones. Dinosaur tracks, no doubt. As we looked closer, we could see that there were both handprints and footprints, and some of them had finger and toe marks. They had the telltale shape of tracks left by sauropods. We had found a 170-million-year-old dinosaur dance floor, records left by colossal sauropods that were about fifty feet long and weighed as much as three elephants.”

“THE JURASSIC PERIOD marks the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs proper. Yes, the first true dinosaurs entered the scene at least 30 million years before the Jurassic began. But as we’ve seen, these earlier Triassic dinosaurs had not even a remote claim to being dominant. Then Pangea began to split, and the dinosaurs emerged from the ashes and found themselves with a new, much emptier world, which they proceeded to conquer. Over the first few tens of millions of years of the Jurassic, dinosaurs diversified into a dizzying array of new species. Entirely new subgroups originated, some of which would persist for another 130-plus million years. They got larger and spread around the globe, colonizing humid areas, deserts, and everything in between. By the middle part of the Jurassic, the major types of dinosaurs could be found all over the world. That quintessential image, so often repeated in museum exhibits and kids’ books, was real life: dinosaurs thundering across the land, at the top of the food chain, ferocious meat-eaters comingling with long-necked giants and armored and plated plant-eaters, the little mammals and lizards and frogs and other non-dinosaurs cowering in fear.”

“The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.”

“I started writing this book two years ago, to write the book I wish I had when I was finishing my undergrad or in my first years of grad school.”

“No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”

“Lots of things are mystries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.”

“Everyone makes mistakes, the brighter folks the more elaborate ones.”

“Back in my day, we didn’t have these fancy neural networks! We had 1.5 billion parameters, and we LIKED IT!”

“when the words not enough to describe how much you love....”