Christa Sadler: Life in Stone: Fossils of the Colorado Plateau

Lavish photos and authoritative, friendly text combine in an elegant introduction to the fossil wealth of America's greatest paleontological province. This compact volume instructs fossil fans from the ground up while incorporating enough substance to feed many years of learning.

The huge Colorado Plateau is a superb preserve of sedimentary rocks. In the 1860s geologist John S. Newberry declared it a sedimentary paradise, "the most splendid exposure of stratified rocks that there is in the world." The Plateau rose to its present high elevation only recently in geologic time. For much of the past billion years, this region was covered by shallow seas; at other times it was low-lying forest, swampland or desert. The strata have locked within their layers a fossil record covering hundreds of millions of years, and research is booming there today.

In "Life in Stone: Fossils of the Colorado Plateau," paleontologist Christa Sadler presents a tour through time in the fossil-bearing deposits of the Plateau. It is not a continuous story, nor is the fossil record good in all epochs. The span from the Carboniferous Period to the Eocene Epoch, from about 320 million to 35 million years ago, is the glory of the Plateau. Sadler covers its amphibians, dinosaurs and early mammals in detail (as well as its coeval plants), but the earlier shelly faunas and later Ice Age animals are not slighted.

"Life in Stone" is a comfortable entree to the fossil wealth of the Plateau that will serve even the dedicated fossil hound. From the well-presented table of geologic ages in the front endpapers to the maps of corresponding rock exposures inside the back cover, Sadler's elegant, lavishly illustrated book will keep you well oriented in time, space and science.