Introduction

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The Age of Reptiles ended because it had gone on long enough and
it was all a mistake in the first place.

Will Cuppy, How to become extinct (1941)

It is hard to make sense of the history of life on Earth. A mass of

strange and extraordinary animals and plants perhaps flits before
our eyes when we think of prehistory: Neanderthal man,
mammoths, dinosaurs, ammonites, trilobites . . . and of course a
time when there was no life at all, or at least merely microscopic
beasts of extreme simplicity floating in the primeval ocean.

These impressions come from many sources. Children today are

weaned on dinosaur books, and the images of living, breathing
dinosaurs are everywhere, in movies and television
documentaries. Then, too, as children, many people have gone to
coastal cliffs or quarries and collected their own fossil ammonites
or trilobites. These common fossils, as well as many much more
spectacular and beautiful examples, such as petrifactions of
exquisite fishes showing all their scales, still shiny after millions of
years, may be seen in fossil shops, or in lavish photographs in
coffee table books and on the web.
Copyright 2008. OUP Oxford.

Most people are aware that dinosaurs, despite their ubiquity in

modern culture, lived a long time before the first humans, and

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