Description:
The first book to approach the Cretaceous extinction--the period during which dinosaurs disappeared from Earth--from the perspective of the fossil record.
Brief description: J. David Archibald is professor emeritus of biology at San Diego State University and curator of mammals in the SDSU Vertebrate Collections. His books include Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era: What the Fossils Say (1996) and Aristotle's Ladder, Darwin's Tree: The Evolution of Visual Metaphors for Biological Order (2014), both from Columbia University Press.
Review Quotes: Archibald presents a superb synopsis of vertebrate fossil assemblages found in the western interior of the U.S. leading up to the extinction . . . [He] claims that sea-level change is the principal cause of dinosaur extinction, but he does not deny that meteoritic impact also played a role . . . The student is exposed to the details behind the theories, and the reasoning that drives serious scientific debate. The well-informed geologist will see a side of the extinction debate that has not been promoted in the press and nonspecialist literature.