Fossil Lake and the Rise of Modern Birds: Snapshots from Early Avian Evolution

Lavishly produced with color fossil photographs throughout, the first comprehensive summary of findings at one of the world’s best fossil bird localities, offering profound insight into early avian evolution after the end-of-Cretaceous extinction event. What is today a high mountain desert in southwestern Wyoming was, 52 million years ago, a magnificent subtropical lake system. Part of the famed Green River Formation, the limestone layers of this region’s Fossil Lake provide an unparalleled record of life in the Early Eocene of North America. Evolutionary biologist Lance Grande has spent much of his career collecting and studying the beautiful and diverse assemblage of fossils from this locality. Since his 2013 book, The Lost World of Fossil Lake, researchers have uncovered many new fossil bird specimens—often stunningly preserved skeletons, sometimes even including feathers—and benefited from significant advances in our understanding of avian evolution. Their findings help to illuminate the early days of bird life on Earth. In this volume, Grande and his collaborators—paleornithologists Daniel T. Ksepka and Gerald Mayr—explore these birds of Fossil Lake, where various researchers have formally named and described thirty avian species. The authors also present an additional twenty possible new species awaiting further study and formal review, birds that may soon be added to that list. Fossil Lake and the Rise of Modern Birds then places these avian ancestors within the global context of other fossil birds. Like Grande’s previous publications, this comprehensive work features stunning imagery, including nearly two hundred detailed fossil photographs—fifty that have never appeared elsewhere.  Whether you are an ornithologist, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, or amateur fossil enthusiast interested in the early evolutionary diversification of modern birds, this book is a treasure.