Lone Star Dinosaurs (Louise Lindsey Merrick Natural Environment Series)

Some 111 million years ago, deep in the heart of Texas, a herd of twenty-ton dinosaurs sauntered across a wet mud flat. Their footprints eventually became frozen in stone, leaving a sign of one fleeting moment of a particular day in the lives of these magnificent creatures.

Today, after mountains of time have passed, the story of dinosaurs in what is now Texas is being reconstructed, footprint by footprint, bone by bone. Lone Star Dinosaurs tells that story, along with the exciting tale of the discoveries that have opened a peephole into the past. Behind each fossil find, there is not just a dinosaur but a person-- sometimes a child--whose spark of curiosity lights the picture of prehistory. This is a thrilling story, engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, through which young and old alike can enter the world of the dinosaurs and the world of the dinosaur hunters.

Dinosaurs are a Texas legacy from worlds long past. Pleurocoelus, Alamosaurus, Acrocanthosaurus, Chasmosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Tenontosaurus are among the representatives Texas boasts of every basic group of dinosaurs--a remarkable diversity that samples nearly the entire range of dinosaurian development over an immense expanse of time. In fact, the three dinosaur-bearing areas within the state--the Panhandle, Central Texas, and Big Bend--yield treasures of vastly different ages, from the beginning of the Mesozoic Era more than 200 million years ago to the time of the big extinction some 66 million years ago. These dinosaurs lived in such different arrangements of the continents and oceans that they may as well have lived in different worlds. Their stories offer a compelling picture of the history of life on our planet.