William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Text © Brian J. Ford 2018
Photographs © Individual copyright holders
Cover image © Natural History Museum, London/Science Photo Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008218935
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008218911
Version: 2019-05-17
Contents
Chapter 1: Dinosaurs and the Ancients
Chapter 2: Emerging from the Shadows
Chapter 3: The Public Eruption
Chapter 4: Great American Discoveries
Chapter 5: Drifting Continents
Chapter 6: Reptile Dysfunction
Chapter 7: How Microbes Made the World
Chapter 8: Wading with Dinosaurs
Chapter 9: Copulating Colossus
Chapter 11: The Life and Death of Dinosaurs
This is the updated, second edition of a book I didn’t want to publish. For decades I deliberated on the giant dinosaurs, pondering as the palæontologists unveiled their findings, and it was obvious that they were getting dinosaurs wrong. I waited for the truth to dawn, but it didn’t happen. The scientific evidence is now clear – the way dinosaurs are explained is incorrect. So this book has a bold and irreverent aim, for it sets out to demolish our present-day orthodoxies and to create a radical new view of how dinosaurs developed and the way they lived their lives. I am also launching a startling theory which shows how we have misunderstood the Cretaceous period, that great era when the gigantic dinosaurs held sway. Our current understanding is fundamentally misconstrued: the environment was different; the climate was different; the landscape was different. Dinosaurs were different. Everything we know about the age of the dinosaurs is misconceived, and producing this book has been the only way to revolutionize this entire scientific discipline. It has been a colossal undertaking.
We are going to travel back in time to see how the development of our planet was determined, how fossils were discovered, and how science started to understand evolution and the way the world became the way it is. As we set out on this extraordinary journey, I would like to thank the many dinosaur specialists around the world who have assisted with advice. Truly, I’d like to very much; but I cannot. None of them helped – instead, every dinosaur expert has attacked this new theory whenever it has appeared (or tried to). Those palæontologists around the world are so very antagonistic to every word within, that you may have pebbles thrown at your windows if one of them spies this book in your room. This iconoclastic review has been the target of bitter hostility and the most vitriolic insults, though my inquiries into dinosaurs were never intended to be about controversy, but simply about debating how those massive monsters evolved and how they lived their remarkable lives.
There is clearly a requirement for a detailed explanation of dinosaur research. As Larry Witham has pointed out: ‘It is bad news to science museums when four in ten Americans believe humans lived with dinosaurs.’1 There is certainly a need for a survey of the whole field, dating back to prehistory, looking at the pioneers and the early discoveries, and following how opinions have changed over the years.
Why did this study of such colossal creatures capture my attention, since I am a biologist preoccupied by the smallest microscopic living organisms – single cells? Dinosaurs were the largest animals ever, and should be far from my central interests. Yet there is a link between monstrous dinosaurs and microscopic cells. In 1993, Dippy the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum in London had her tail raised. This long tail