(Ebook) Time of the Giants 1st Edition by Thom Holmes ISBN 0816059616 978-0816059614

The story of the best-known dinosaurs is told in Time of the Giants. The Middle and Late Jurassic epochs saw the largest land animals ever to walk the Earth the sauropods. But the giants were not alone; other kinds of dinosaurs were diversifying rapidly as well. Most notably, predatory dinosaurs began their own trend towards gigantism, and the prolific development of plated and armored herbivores filled ecological spaces not occupied by the long-necked behemoths. By the end of the Jurassic period, dinosaurs achieved efficient extremism in the size of land animals with equally elegant metabolic and thermoregulatory mechanisms to maintain an active lifestyle. At the other end of the size scale, some small meat-eating dinosaurs, such as Archaeopteryx, developed powered flight and gave rise to birds. This fully illustrated book also examines the scientific view of dinosaurs as living creatures. Once considered docile and inactive like their distant cold-blooded reptile relatives dinosaurs are now thought to have been active, energetic creatures that used a variety of methods to maintain a constant body temperature.