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Dinosaurs didn’t die out when an asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago. Get ready to unthink what you thought you knew and journey into the deep, dark depths of the Jurassic.

The discovery of the first feathered dinosaur in China in 1996 sent shockwaves through the palaeontological world. Were the feathers part of a complex mating ritual, or a stepping stone in the evolution of flight? And just how closely related is T. rex to a chicken?

Award-winning journalist John Pickrell reveals how dinosaurs developed flight and became the birds in our backyards. He delves into the latest discoveries in China, the US, Europe and uncovers a thriving black market in fossils and infighting between dinosaur hunters, plus the controversial plan to use a chicken to bring dinosaurs back from the dead.

ISBN 9781742233666 | Published in Australia by NewSouth | Published in North America by Columbia University Press | 240pp | 234x153mm | $29.99

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Weird Dinosaurs advance copies

Exciting news for fans of Flying Dinosaurs, my new book – Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew – is coming very soon.

Advance copies  are hot off the press and have just arrived from my publisher NewSouth. It goes on sale in Australia on 1 November. The US/UK version will be published by Columbia University Press next year, but I don’t have exact dates yet. Watch this space…

You can pre-order Weird Dinosaurs in Australia now at Booktopia or Angus & Robertson (unfortunately they do not ship outside Australia/New Zealand).

I’ll post the details when the book arrives on Amazon for pre-order in the rest of the world. Find out more about the book.


Weird Dinosaurs coverWeird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew

We’re in a golden age of discovery – and the fossils coming to light show dinosaurs were stranger, bigger, scarier and more diverse than we ever imagined.

From outback Australia to the Gobi Desert and the savanna of Madagascar, award-winning science writer John Pickrell sets out on a world tour of new discoveries and meets the fossil hunters leading the charge.

Weird Dinosaurs back coverDiscover the dwarf dinosaurs unearthed by an eccentric Transylvanian baron, an aquatic, crocodile-snouted carnivore bigger than T. rex, the Chinese dinosaur with wings like a bat, and a Patagonian sauropod so enormous it was heavier than two commercial jet airliners.

Why did dinosaurs grow so huge? Did they all have feathers? And what do sauropods have in common with 1950s vacuum cleaners? Weird Dinosaurs examines the latest breakthroughs and new technologies radically transforming our understanding of the distant past.

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Banner image: Feathered dinosaur Guanlong wucaii faces off against its modern relative and ‘flying dinosaur’ the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). Guanlong is the earliest known tyrannosaur (Late Jurassic, 158–163 million years ago) and one of the smallest members of the group at about 4 metres long. Credit: Guanlong wucaii © Peter Schouten, reproduced with permission. Haliaeetus leucocephalus, Thinkstock.

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