快猫短视频

Time Traveler by Michael Novacek, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, ISBN 0374278806

FOSSIL enthusiasts must envy Michael Novacek鈥檚 job. It鈥檚 a plum: he鈥檚 curator of palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It all began in downtown LA, which might not seem the most inspiring childhood environment for a wannabe fossil hunter.

But as we learn from Novacek鈥檚 autobiographical Time Traveller, a diet of movies such as King Kong and the life-size statues of mammoths and sabretooth cats at the nearby Rancho La Brea Park fired the imagination of a solitary child. Other tendencies that set him on the path to palaeontology included a liking for 鈥渃rawling around in the dirt 鈥� turning over rocks鈥�.

As an internationally renowned expert, Novacek is well placed to tell the serious scientific story of vertebrate evolution, expertly dovetailed with stories of his own expeditions. With sweaty detail, his latest book takes us, as promised in the subtitle, from Montana to Mongolia on the trail of dinosaurs, thanks to the sort of funding prestigious American museums and institutions can provide. It is not all dinosaurs either. His story also tracks the long evolution of our own lot, those early mammals that coexisted with the dinosaurs. A good read for all fossilphiles.