How is it that we came to be here? The search for answers to that question has preoccupied humans for millennia. Scientists have sought clues in the genes of living things, in the physical environments of Earth from mountaintops to the depths of the ocean, in the chemistry of this world and those nearby, in the tiniest particles of matter, and in the deepest reaches of space. In Islands of the Cosmos, Dale A. Russell traces a path from the dawn of the universe to speculations about our future on this planet. He centers his story on the physical and biological processes in evolution, which interact to favor more successful, and eliminate less successful, forms of life. Marvelously, these processes reveal latent possibilities in life's basic structure, and propel a major evolutionary theme: the increasing proficiency of biological function. It remains to be seen whether the human form can survive the dynamic processes that brought it into existence. Yet the emergence of the ability to acquire knowledge from experience, to optimize behavior, to conceptualize, to distinguish "good" from "bad" behavior all hint at an evolutionary outcome that science is only beginning to understand.

Islands in the Cosmos: The Evolution of Life on Land (Life of the Past)

Science & Math

Russell, Dale A.

Biological Sciences

Indiana University Press

Vanished World

University of Chicago Press (Trd)

First published in 1989 and easily the best book on dinosaurs yet available, Russell combines scholarship with beautiful colour illustrations in a study of dinosaur species in the ecological and physical environments in which they evolved and thrived. The book is the best of our current knowledge. 98 colour illustrations.

An Odyssey in Time: The Dinosaurs of North America

Children's Books

Animals

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

A Vanished World: The Dinosaurs of Western Canada

National Museum of Natural Sci

<div>A classic work from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History describing the mosasaurs, a group of large predatory marine lizards of the Mesozoic ???Mosasaurs have captured the imagination of readers everywhere interested in prehistoric life, and they remain a focus of paleontological study to this day. This edition of Dale Russell's Systematics and Morphology of American Mosasaurs presents the complete, classic text, generously illustrated with more than one hundred drawings and photographs, and includes a new foreword by vertebrate paleontologist Jacques A. Gauthier (Yale University and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History).</div>

Systematics and Morphology of American Mosasaurs

The Yale Peabody Museum

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Books by Russell, Dale A.