A grand survey of the Earth in the Age of Reptiles by a man who has done everything from running the American Museum of Natural History to scraping bones in the Gobi Desert. Combining scientific description with fascinating accounts of actual events in the field of fossil hunting, he gives sharp profiles of the different periods and animals within the Mesozoic Era and is often touching as he stops to characterize a beast- a block busting tyrannosaurus or the bumbling duck bill it is about to capture.