What does the fossil record really tell us about the evolution and extinction of dinosaurs? What was the dinosaurs' exact relationship to the rest of the organic world? And what do they disclose about our own place in the history of life?

Paleontologists Mark A. Norell, Eugene S. Gaffney, and Lowell Dingus, the curators responsible for the American Museum of Natural History's new Halls of Dinosaurs, have made these questions central to the concept and design of their spectacular reinstallation and to Discovering Dinosaurs.

Drawing on their extensive experience in the field and in the laboratory, and on the incredible resources of the Museum - the world's premier collection of dinosaur fossils and information - they give us an authentic, fantasy-free understanding of these remarkable animals and their position in the great diversity of life.

The authors use photographs, original drawings, maps, charts, diagrams, and historical and contemporary narratives to answer all our questions, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, about the lives and characteristics of dinosaurs; to provide a complete picture of the most important skeletons exhibited in the Halls of Dinosaurs; and to assess the genealogical relationships among these animals, and between them and later species.

In words and pictures, the history of each fossil's discovery, excavation, acquisition by the Museum, and reconstruction is woven together with the story of paleontology: the unraveling, over the past 150 years, of the evolutionary record, mostly by the intrepid paleontologists who scoured remote lands in search of evidence, in historic expeditions all over the world sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History.

Discovering Dinosaurs is the story of one of the greatest of all scientific enterprises, an undertaking that, as the authors describe it, transports us simultaneously to the primeval past and to the frontiers of scientific investigation today.