In Wonderful Life, Gould tells the story of the reinterpretation of the unusual fossils of the Burgess Shale: "a grand and wonderful story of the highest intellectual merit — with no one killed, no one even injured or scratched, but a new world revealed." Reviewing Wonderful Life for Nature, Richard A. Fortey wrote, "There is no question about the historical importance of the Burgess Shale, and Gould is right when he says that it deserves a place in the public consciousness along with big bangs and black holes ....

Jack Horner is well known as the model for the iconoclastic Jurassic Park paleontologist, but the real story of his discovery of the stupendous 10,000-specimen Maiosaur site, complete with nests, eggs, and hatchlings, is even more impressive than the movie. His collaborator, science writer James Gorman, keeps the prose moving in a conversational style. Well-illustrated.

An exciting recounting of the 19th-century discovery of the dinosaurs, featuring such characters as Mary Anning, William Buckland, Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen, Gideon Mantell, and Charles Lyell. Carl Zimmer writes, "Cadbury ... turns what could have been just a string of anecdotes into high drama. Much of her success comes from her depth of research: she has scoured diaries, letters and newspaper archives and can tell her story in the words of the people who lived it."

Lavishly illustrated, Wildlife of Gondwana describes the past diversity of life on Gondwana, the supercontinent that later dispersed into Antarctica, India, Australia, Africa, and South America. As Patricia Vickers-Rich writes on its Amazon.com page, "Tom and I very much enjoyed writing this book over a period of eight years originally — then spent another two years revising [it]. We were able to see and record infomation about so many new Gondwana fossils, and it led us into many new research projects and introduced us to many new people we never knew before.