https://signalthroughstatic.cc/casefiles/paleontology/Recent content in Paleontology on Signal Through StaticHugoen© 2026 S. Caronia / J. Miller · <a href="https://github.com/josephusm/blog/blob/main/LICENSE" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CC BY-NC-SA 4.0</a> · <a href="https://github.com/josephusm/blog/blob/main/COPYRIGHT" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Copyright</a>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://signalthroughstatic.cc/signals/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-dinosaurs/Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://signalthroughstatic.cc/signals/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-dinosaurs/<p>Steve Brusatte&rsquo;s <em>The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs</em> wants to do for paleontology what Neil deGrasse Tyson did for astrophysics — make a technical field feel personal and urgent. For about half the book, it succeeds brilliantly. Then it starts listing celebrities.</p> <h2 id="the-best-part-origins">The Best Part: Origins</h2> <p>The opening chapters are genuinely exciting. Brusatte reconstructs a world where dinosaurs were not the inevitable rulers of the Mesozoic but marginal players — small, bipedal, overshadowed by the crocodile-line archosaurs that dominated the Triassic. The extinction at the end of the Permian, the worst in Earth&rsquo;s history, had cleared the landscape. Dinosaurs walked into empty rooms.</p>