Gorgon
Subtitle: paleontology, obsession, and the greatest catastrophe in earth's history
By: Peter D. Ward.
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 257
Subjects: Permian; South Africa; Paleontology; Paleozoology; Science; Science/Mathematics; Earth Sciences - Meteorology & Climatology; Life Sciences - Evolution; Science / General; Geology, Stratigraphic; Catastrophes (Geology); Geology, Structural; Karroo
First sentence: The ends of long love affairs are never painless.
Description: Millions of years before the Age of Dinosaurs, an environmental cataclysm annihilated 90 percent of all plant and animal life on the planet. In this lost world that was swept away 250 million years ago, the ferocious lizard-like Gorgon was the T. rex of its day. In this remarkable journey of discovery deep into Earth's history, Peter D. Ward, one of the world's most recognized authorities on mass extinctions, examines the strange and mysterious fate of this little-known prehistoric animal and its contemporaries--the ancestors of the turtle, the crocodile, the lizard, and eventually the dinosaur. Based on more than a decade's research in South Africa's Karoo Desert, Ward's groundbreaking work offers provocative theories on the mass extinctions of the past and confronts the startling implications they hold for humanity's future on the planet.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-243) and index.
Table of contents: title: Arriving; title: Bones in the Karoo; title: Gradual or sudden?; title: Land and sea; title: Karoo magnetics; title: A change of rivers; title: The stone house at Tussen die Riviere; title: Retrieval; title: The rate of killing; title: Drawing conclusions; title: Buckyballs; title: A new kind of extinction; title: Resolution; title: Legacy and lessons of a catastrophe : are we living on a safe planet?