Best biology of fossils books according to redditors

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

when michael crichton wrote the book "jurassic park", and wrote "velociraptor" he actually did, in fact, mean deinonychus antirrhopus. this was not a mistake or embellishment made by the special effects people, and the raptors were always intended to be man-sized.

crichton had read greg paul's book, predatory dinosaurs of the world, which proposes (incorrectly) that velociraptor and deinonychus are synonyms, and shows all depictions of the raptor d. antirrhopus labeled as "v. antirrhopus" and "velociraptor" because that particular name was coined first. from the context in the book, it's very clear that crichton meant to describe deinonychus, particularly in part because they are digging them up in the US.

what's curious is that the special effects people, while evidently aware of the misnomer (admitting they knew the dinosaur was deinonychus), took all their cues from the novel, and not paul's textbook. in "predatory dinosaurs", every single depiction of either velociraptor is covered in feathers.

First, I'm going to say that I'm glad this is the actual question. I was really hoping, when I clicked, that it was about dropping Mt. Everest, and not something as boring as falling from Mt. Everest. Give your kid a high-five for me.

Second, I'm going to make a simplifying assumption: that air resistance can be ignored. I provide no math to justify this assumption, but do so on the grounds that a) Mt. Everest is on the same order of size as the Chicxulub asteroid (the one that killed the dinosaurs), and b) the math that other, smarter people did about that asteroid impact suggests that for an object that big, going that fast, air resistance is entirely unimportant.

This kind of shafts your kid's question, since the whole concept of "terminal velocity" depends on air resistance actually mattering. Which is true, but as a concept, terminal velocity also only really applies within the realm of human(ish)-scale objects. For you, or a giraffe, or a schoolbus, or a space shuttle, then sure. Calculate terminal velocity. But for a mountain? Meh. Just not going to matter.

Thus, I will re-interpret your kid's question as "how fast would Mt. Everest be going when it hit?"

To answer that, I'm going to make what is possibly an obvious observation, but one which greatly eases the problem: how fast it's going when it hits depends on how high up you drop it from.

If you drop it from a distance of 1 meter, then we can calculate the impact speed as:

1 meter = 1/2*a*t^2

where a = 9.8 m/s^(2), and t is the time it takes to fall. Solving for t, we get:

t = sqrt(2 / a)

This, we can substitute into the formula for speed under constant acceleration, v = a*t, to get:

v = a*sqrt(2 / a)

And after moving the first a inside the square root and simplifying, we get:

v = sqrt(2a)

Plugging in 9.8m/s^2 for a, we find that the impact speed after dropping Mt. Everest from a height of 1 meter is 4.42 meters per second.

(And please, point out to your kid that being able to answer questions like this is why it's important to learn algebra. It may sound frivolous, but yes, the reason some internet weirdo can answer your kid's goofball question is because I paid attention in algebra class.)

But your kid doesn't care about dropping a mountain from a measly 1 meter high. From your kid's choice of object to drop, I can tell that your kid is looking for an extreme answer. Your kid wants to know about the maximum impact speed. As any right-thinking kid would.

For that, we're going to have to take Mt. Everest out into space. Waaaay out into space. So far out, that the gravitational acceleration is not 9.8 meters/second^2 anymore. So far out, that we can't use the above formula to figure out the speed anymore, because the acceleration is no longer constant. (Not that it was constant before, strictly speaking, but it was close enough not to care.)

If you take Mt. Everest infinitely far away, Earth's gravitational pull becomes infinitely weak. The farther we go, the weaker it gets, but never quite reaches zero. This means that the further we take the mountain, the faster it will go, but the amount more faster it goes diminishes rapidly. After a while, (like, a million kilometers or whatever), it's just not worth the bother to take it the next million kilometers. Sure, it'll go a little bit faster, but not much.

Mathematically, there is a limit to how fast the mountain will go (stay awake during algebra-2, kid, to learn about limits). You can approach this limit by taking the mountain further and further away, but you'll never quite reach it.

Doesn't mean you can't calculate what it would be, though. However, as limits are your gateway drug to calculus, it's not surprising that calculus is what you need to properly calculate the limiting speed.

Now, while I did pay attention in calculus, I can't say that I paid attention well enough to whip the correct integral out of my pants on the spur of the moment, especially not at 11 on a Saturday night, when by all rights I should really be in bed partying with a good book.

Fortunately, I don't have to. Because gravity is symmetric. Meaning, gravity doesn't care which direction you're moving. It pulls on you just as hard, at some given distance, whether you're moving towards the earth or away.

And since an integral is really just a fancy way of adding up an infinite number of tiny increments, and since addition doesn't care what order you add stuff up in, you're free to add up the increments in order towards the earth or in order away from the earth. (Strictly speaking, you need to pick a sign convention and put a minus sign in front of those integrals, but whatever. We don't actually care about direction, only magnitude, so we can ignore the sign of the result.)

The net result of all this is that the limit of Mt. Everest's falling speed when it hits the earth is exactly the same as the speed you would have to throw it if you wanted to throw the mountain completely off the earth never to return.

And that speed goes by another, more familiar name: escape velocity.

Put another way: the fastest you can ever go by falling towards a planet is exactly the same as how fast you need to be going to get away from the planet.

So the ultimate reason I don't have to worry about pulling an integral out of my pants on a Saturday night, is because I can just google Earth's escape velocity, and that's the same answer as your kid is looking for: 11.2 kilometers per second

Just don't do it, kid, or you'll wipe us out just like the dinosaurs.

That really is the best, and if you like

mushrooms https://www.amazon.com/Mushrooms-Demystified-David-Arora/dp/0898151694
or https://www.amazon.com/All-That-Rain-Promises-More/dp/0898153883

or rocks https://www.amazon.com/Gem-Trails-Oregon-Garret-Romaine/dp/1889786446

Stephen Brusatte's Dinosaur Paleobiology might be right up your alley; very readable while remaining rigorously academic.

You are in for a damn treat -- Colorado rockhounding is some of the best anywhere! I'll give you my abbreviated list of stuff in South-Central CO, a couple hours away from Denver, since that's the area I'm most familiar with. But there is plenty of stuff directly in your neck of the woods, and I'd highly recommend picking up copies of Voynick's Colorado Rockhounding, Kapelle's Rockhounding Colorado, and especially Mitchell's Gem Trails of Colorado. The Roadside Geology book is good, too.

Trout Creek Pass pegmatites, about 20 minutes east of Buena Vista. The Clora May Mine is the easiest to access, with only a ~15 minute hike uphill. It's got some great chunks of pink feldspar, biotite and muscovite mica, and some massive (in the geology sense of the term) quartz/smoky quartz. There's a smaller amount of black tourmaline, although the quality isn't generally great IMHO. But the real prize is the uncommon rare earth minerals such as Aeschynite-(Y), Polycrase-(Y), and Xenotime. They're generally not breathtakingly beautiful, but a fantastic addition to your collection if you're a chemistry buff. Don't try and take them on the plane with you, though -- some are surprisingly radioactive.

Ruby Mountain, ~20 minutes south of BV. It's easy to find, and not bad of a hike up. Halfway up, there's a good outcropping for perlite and obsidian "Apache tears". The top is mostly rhyolite, but there are small (think millimeters, not centimeters) garnets in some pieces. More rarely, there are some funky "flower" shaped formations with tiny crystals of topaz. This site is pretty well picked over and half is on private land, but it's definitely convenient.

The Rock Doc. Awesome rock and mineral store in the same area as the above. You can also pick up supplies, books, and local intel on collecting sites.

Also not a site as such, but the National Mining Hall of Fame in Leadville has a fantastic collection. The Rock Hut mineral store in town has good specimens, but a bit pricey for my taste.

Mount Antero. The aquamarine is legendary, but this is definitely not a casual collecting spot. Inaccessible most of the year, lots of active claims, bad afternoon lightning storms. Wouldn't recommend unless you happen to plan ahead with an experienced local as a guide.

There are a few quarries, mines, and collecting sites around and behind Salida. Midway Springs has some cool Aragonite features -- you can find bright red-and-white chunks that look like miniature caves, including speleothems. There's good Magnetite and Actinolite specimens from the Calumet Mine, but it's not always open to collecting. I've never found anything worth writing home about in this area, but there's many sites I haven't seen.

Browns Canyon. The old fluorite mine on the way down has a bit of botryoidal white/clear fluorite on the dumps, but as above -- nothing to write home about. Cool igneous rocks further down the road, and I've found hydrothermal deposits of the uncommon tennis-ball green Vanadium mineral Volborthite.

There's stuff up towards the ghost town of St Elmo, but it's a bit hard to get to (especially before June/July) and there are a lot of active claims in the area.

Go to the Bayou Salado Trading Post in Hartsel. The owners hold claims on nearby land for blue and yellow Barite, and you can dig for a nominal fee of like ~$5. It's very hot in the summer, but the crystals are abundant and just lie scattered in the red mud. They actually get more blue with sunlight exposure, unlike most minerals! There are some bigger clusters buried, if you're willing to dig.

Bonanza is an old mining town (pop. 16) further south in Saguache County. Not a lot to find without local help and 4WD, but I have found tiny crystals of Sylvanite, one of Colorado's famous Telluride minerals.

Westcliffe / Silver Cliff, previously a silver mining region. I've only been down this way once, but there are lots of digsites on public land north of town. My best find from that day was Rhyolite with Liesegang Rings. The Sangre de Cristo Gallery and Rockshop in town had great prices, in my experience.

Pinnacle Mine, across Monarch Pass. It's an active uranium mine and closed to collecting, but I thought I'd mention it because the front gate (covered in "No Trespassing" and "Danger -- Radioactivity" signs) is an awesome place for a selfie.

Also take a look at the Peak to Peak online guide to CO sites, GatorGirl's page for Colorado and the Mindat page.

And don't forget to drop by the Denver natural history museum's mineral hall! The Alma King is pretty much the iconic piece of Colorado mining history!

I don't know about Oregon, but I know that rock hunting is a blast, and finding anything gem grade is unusual, as most of the good locations are privately owned. Pick up a copy of Oregon Gem Trails or search for gem and mineral clubs in your area.

If you go to local creeks with gravel bars, you will see a little bit of everything the creek cuts through, if you spot something interesting you can trace it upstream to its origin. I'm under the impression there is a lot of agate in volcanic parts of Oregon. Gem grade agate is unusually colorful, has strong patterns, and no empty voids or fractures; that material is less common, but you should be able to find agate.

Ice Age Mammals of North America is a good one. It's written for an informed audience, but general enough as an overview.

A recent good book is End of the Megafauna by Ross MacPhee, which examines the disappearance of most of the great beasts of the Cenozoic.

Two recent picture-heavy books: the Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals and National Geographic: Prehistoric Mammals. The second is aimed at a younger audience but still has plenty of meat for adult readers.

Speaking of younger readers, John Rafferty's The Cenozoic Era: Age of Mammals will give you a good grounding in the geological history of the Cenozoic and what was happening around the world. It's aimed at high school and college students but doesn't at all talk down. Definitely worth the read.

Horned Armadillos and Rafting Monkeys is a deep dive on the isolated fauna of Cenozoic South America.

For a better sense of the actual fossil record, see Bruce Stinchcomb's photo-heavy Cenozoic Fossils books for the Paleogene and the Neogene.

The second edition is now really dated (though the 3rd ed should be out next year). It's really not a good book to start on though, if you have no more than a general interest in dinosaurs you need something more basic to build up your knowledge and understanding to tackle something like that which is very technical.

Look to something that's more aimed at college students or equivalents like these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dinosaur-Paleobiology-TOPA-Topics/dp/0470656581 and https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dinosaurs-Concise-Natural-David-Fastovsky/dp/1316501159/ref=pd_sim_14_8?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KKXQASPCZSWD9F1TT35H

How about gem and mineral specimens?

one more

I just finished reading Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History, which is literally a college textbook, and I quite enjoyed it. It's not in color thought, if that's what you're looking for.

Buy yourself a copy of "Gem Trails of Washington" by Garrett Romaine. It will be in there if it's still open to collecting by the public.

http://www.amazon.com/Gem-Trails-Washington-Garret-Romaine/dp/1889786403/

You could also visit Tim Fisher's Ore-Rock-On page and buy his DVD. It has Oregon, Washington and Idaho rockhounding sites, including GPS coordinates where available.

http://www.orerockon.com/CD.htm

Anything by Stephen Jay Gould for evolution, zoology, and earth science. Some of the science is dated - he passed in 2002 - but he always gives a comprehensive read of his subject material without being dry or overly academic.

In particular, Wonderful Life tells the story of the Burgess Shale, which details the discovery of a trove of unknown extinct species. The science has been updated since - see The Crucible of Creation - but Gould tells a better story.

Along these lines, also check out The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker.

Here's a decent book on rockhounding in Oregon:

http://www.amazon.com/Gem-Trails-Oregon-Garret-Romaine/dp/1889786446/

Get the 2009 version, not the earlier one.

I enjoyed the documentary by Attenborough and also "Wonderful Life" by Gould. By far the best text I have read about the Cambrian explosion and the fossils of the Burgess Shale is "the Crucible of Creation : The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals.

The author Simon Conway Morris is a Cambridge academic who published many of the papers describing these crazy organisms. The book is quite scholarly, compared to Goulds which is more aimed at the layperson, it not only tells the story of the fossils but also of the researchers and people involved in their discovery.

The book was written after "wonderful life" and chapter 8 contains some counter arguments/ideas to Gould's propositions. Its fascinating to read about these discoveries from the people actually involved in them and not from a 3rd party as it were.

I can't recommend it enough.

Last Ape Standing. http://www.amazon.com/Last-Ape-Standing-Seven-Million-Year-Survived/dp/1620405210

If he’s 7 then I would recommend getting one of those books that has pretty photos of all the minerals and some diagrams of their structures too. Something like this. Minerals look amazing enough without getting into the abstraction of the chemistry and such, just seeing stunning photos of them all was motivation enough for my kid self to learn more.

Choosing places to actively go rock/mineral hunting is the other half to keeping him interested too, definitely keep that up!

Honestly, modern diversity is pretty good and you ought to get your head around how modern animals work before going into the fossil organisms where a lot of the anatomy is pretty speculative. I can speak to vertebrate morphology much better than invertebrate morphology, so my recommendations will focus on that.

1. A good dissection guide would help a lot. Personally, I like the De Iuliis & Pulera guide. It's well-illustrated and pretty generally clear.
   
   
2. Second thing you need is some reference material on biomechanics and general vertebrate morphology. There are a lot of vertebrate morphology textbooks out there, the Bemis text is probably fine for your purposes. A more specialized text on functional morphology (e.g. this one) would probably help a lot as well.
   
   
3. For fossil stuff, the best textbook surveying fossil morphology of vertebrates is probably the Carroll text, but it is incomplete for a lot of taxa. I really like the Gregory text on fish skulls, for example, which may fill in some of the gaps that Carroll leaves out.
   
   Finally, Stuart Sumida is a vertebrate paleontologist and functional morphologist who periodically consults with Disney and other major animation studios on animal & human locomotion. He's part of the reason there's a sea-change in animal (and human) animation quality in Disney films from Lion King onwards. He's got a bunch of animation resources here and periodically offers workshops for animators. His slides are mostly pretty text-sparse but there may be something of use in there.

Do you still need ideas?

Night vision monocular for late-night wildlife watching: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FWG9LNY/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_img?_encoding=UTF8&colid=C552ND2I2LI2&coliid=I3PQGQCMFU36C1

Batseeker Ultrasonic Bat Detector- This could possibly be really cool or really dumb..
http://www.amazon.com/Batseeker-1-Ultrasonic-Bat-Detector/dp/B00I7M85Z0/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1417910480&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=bat+detector

A few book ideas:
This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works Paperback – January 22, 2013 by John Brockman
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1588344827/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_img?_encoding=UTF8&colid=C552ND2I2LI2&coliid=IAATQQ1EZB5X5

A History of Life in 100 Fossils Hardcover – October 14, 2014 by Paul D. Taylor and Aaron O'Dea
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1588344827/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_img?_encoding=UTF8&colid=C552ND2I2LI2&coliid=IAATQQ1EZB5X5

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC050.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB925.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/illustr.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/faqs.html


http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

Some books:

Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature by Brian Switek

Primate and Human Evolution (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology) by Susan Cachel

The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans by G. J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak, Esteban Sarmiento and Richard Milner

The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors by Ann Gibbons (Apr 10, 2007)

Evolution For Dummies

Also see the books (and other resources) on evolution in our FAQ, and also the resources in the /r/atheistgems FAQ

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edit: Oh, you might find this graphic I made interesting - it's of the evolution of brain size in humans (Homo).

There's a link to another graph at the bottom of that post that also includes Australopithecines, which uses color effectively (it's not on the log-scale though).

The brain sizes in the leftmost fossils in that second display completely overlap modern chimpanzee brain sizes (300-500 cc).

So over 3 million years or so, you see our ancestors brain sizes - through a number of species - go from pretty much exactly the size of a modern chimp's brain, to four times that volume, and then drop back a little (yes, our brains are actually smaller on average than our ancestors brains from a few tens of thousands of years ago).

If you enjoyed that article, do yourself a favor and read this book:

Ice Age Mammals of North America

It may look like a book for kids but it has strong appeal for adults. It goes into detail about all the science related to the most recent wave of ice ages, and has tons of drawings of recently extinct mammals.

One of my favorites!

If you want an overview of palaeontology I recommend these books by Mike Benton to my undergraduates - they are by far an away the best written and comprehensive text books: Basic Palaeontology and Intro to Vert Palaeo.

Hey, it doesn't look like anyone got back to you about the dinosaurs (or I'm just too lazy to check all the sub-threads)

Here are two textbooks that are sometimes used:

• The Complete Dinosaur, 2nd edition
  
  
• Dinosaur Paleobiology

There's certainly plenty of places to do that here. Lots of places to look at fossils in museums and displays as well. My grandpa did lots of rockhounding many years ago, there's so many great places to do that in Oregon. You might check out Gem Trails of Oregon for some maps and hot spots.

This is pretty much the standard for invertebrate paleo.

http://www.amazon.com/Invertebrate-Palaeontology-Evolution-Euan-Clarkson/dp/0632052384