Written by Michael J. Benton e ilustrado por John Sibbick, this book can be considered as a 'must-have' for all those seriously interested in paleontology.

While technical and deep, the book is easy to read and follow; it does not bore even the casual reader due to its excellent layout, self-explanatory graphics andc charts, and amenable text. The intended audience of this book is scientific or academic by nature but however, it can also be used as a work of reference for more general audiences as well.

Here at Andinia we frequently resort to this particular book whenever we are about to start a new expedition seeking fossils, or in order to check our information before writing articles or notes about vertebrate palaeontology, or simply when we would like to think a while about the distant past of our planet, for science is not a process consisting just in logic and analysis but a quest of the imagination to become rationale and in order to imagine how our world and our distant ancestors were. Even the most-detached scientist needs imagination to envision the mechanics of his or her objects of study.

And maybe, just maybe, those scenes that we see, with dinosaurs slowly roaming vast expanses that are no more, are not figments of a slightly educated imagination but the remains of collective memories passed upon incredible numbers of generations and still lurking in some hidden spots in our minds.

Could it be that the survival of life on Earth is linked to the existence such memories?

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