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Foreword
By Steve Brusatte
A few years ago, I found myself in the outback of Goiás, Brazil. My days were mostly spent riding on lonely highways in the backseat of a large passenger van. Occasionally the van would stop, our small team would disembark, and we would each grab a hammer and a pair of shin guards. The hammer, to smash rocks. The shin guards, to keep our legs safe from the snakes hiding in the grass. Then we would walk, for hours, through corn fields and quiet villages, past farmhouses, along drainage ditches and dirt roads. We kept our eyes focused on the ground, for scraps of bone and teeth that would connect us to another world.
I am a paleontologist, a scientist who studies fossils to understand what the Earth used to be like. My particular specialty is dinosaurs. This is why I was in Brazil, to join my friend Professor Roberto Candeiro and his students, on the search for new dinosaur fossils. We wanted to know what Brazil was like some 72-66 million years ago, during those last glorious few million years when the dinosaurs reigned, when long-necked sauropods the heft of Boeing 737 airplanes shook the ground, when carnivores the size of buses chased down their prey and shattered bones with their railroad spike teeth. Those last few million years before catastrophe. Before apocalypse. Before a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid fell from space, on the random trajectory of a drunken gunshot, and collided into the Earth, killing the dinosaurs, killing 75% of all living things, changing the world forever. Setting the stage for mammals, for primates, for us.
Not too far from where we were fossil-hunting, in the adjacent state of Minas Gerais, another scientist was sitting in his office. Or maybe he was out observing bees. André Nemesio is a scientist like me, but he mostly studies the present -- the classification and behaviors and evolution of bees and other insects. And like me, André likes to write about science, not just for other scientists, but for the public. A few years later, when the pandemic hit, and André found himself with some unexpected time and space to gather his thoughts, he started to write something amazing. It was science, in part. Fiction, in part. In other words, science fiction. Real science fiction, in the sense that it is a gripping story, but it is informed by the latest science. True science, as understood by a practicing scientist, informed and even supported, in the text, with actual citations to scientific papers.
The result is this fantastic book, The Cretaceous Chronicles. I won't give away the story, as you'll want to experience it yourself. But there will be dinosaurs (so it immediately captured my interest). There's space travel, Mars, and the moon. War and violence and rivalry and heartache, and humanity. And all throughout, you, the reader, will grapple with the what-ifs of history. What if that asteroid never hit the Earth? What if the asteroid was headed to Earth, but the inhabitants of the time had the intelligence to recognize it, and maybe even stop it? What if species had evolved self-awareness and high intelligence before humans? What if we could make a personal connection to the past -- not just through dusty fossil bones and teeth, but in a more direct way, by seeing into the minds of the animals that lived here long before us?
The Cretaceous Chronicles was a cult hit in Brazil when published in late 2020. Here is the English translation, for you to enjoy, to wrestle with, to experience. I promise you dinosaurs like you have never seen them before, but even to a dinosaur enthusiast like me, this book is so much more.
Steve Brusatte
Professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Author of the New York Times bestseller The Rise and Fall of the DInosaurs
August 2021
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