Dinosaurs: How We Know What We Know

✍ Scribed by Mary Higby Schweitzer, Elena Rita Schroeter, Charles Doug Czajka

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 562
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This textbook introduces research on dinosaurs by describing the science behind how we know what we know about dinosaurs. A wide range of topics is covered, from fossils and taphonomy to dinosaur physiology, evolution, and extinction. In addition, sedimentology, paleo-tectonics, and non-dinosaurian Mesozoic life are discussed. There is a special opportunity to capitalize on the enthusiasm for dinosaurs that students bring to classrooms to foster a deeper engagement in all sciences. Students are encouraged to synthesize information, employ critical thinking, construct hypotheses, devise methods to test these hypotheses, and come to new defensible conclusions, just as paleontologists do.

✦ Table of Contents

Dedications
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1: How Do We Understand the Natural World? The Nature of Science and the Field of Paleontology
CHAPTER 2: How Do We Know When Dinosaurs Lived? Interpreting Earth’s History from Rocks
3: How Do We Explain Variation among Past and Present Organisms? Evolution and Evolutionary Mechanisms
4: How Do We Know Who Is Related to Whom? Systematics and Phylogenetic Relationships
5: How Do We Know When and How Life Began and Evolved? The Origin of Life and Evolution through Time
6: How Do We Use Anatomy of Living Animals to Understand Dinosaurs? Bones and Anatomy
7: How Do We Know What a DinosaurIs? Diagnosing and DefiningDinosauria
8: How Do We Name and Group Dinosaurs? Part I: Ornithischian Dinosaurs
9: How Do We Name and Group Dinosaurs? Part II: Saurischian Dinosaurs
10: How Do We Name and Group Mesozoic Animals That Are Not Dinosaurs? Pterosaurs, Marine Reptiles, Mammals, and Others
11: How Do We Know How Dinosaurs Became Part of the Fossil Record? Taphonomy and Fossilization
12: How Do We Interpret the Ecology of Dinosaurs? The Relationship of Dinosaurs to Their Physical and Biological Environments
13: How Do We Know How Dinosaurs Moved? Dinosaur Functional Morphology
14: How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Looked Like? Dinosaur Appearance
15: How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Ate? Direct and Indirect Evidence for Dinosaur Diets
16: How Do We Interpret Dinosaur Behavior? Dinosaur Trackways, Herding, and Pathologies
17: How Do We Know about Dinosaur Reproduction? Mating and Parental Care among Dinosaurs
18: How Do We Know If Dinosaurs Were Warm-Blooded, Cold-Blooded, Or Something in Between? Dinosau rPhysiology and Metabolism
19: How Do We Know Birds Are Dinosaurs? The Phylogeny of Maniraptoriformes and the Origin of Flight
20: How Do We Know about Extinctions? The End of the Dinosaur Reign and Other Mass Extinctions
Index