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Pterosaurs or flying reptiles were the first vertebrates to evolve flight. These distant relatives of modern reptiles and dinosaurs lived from the Late Triassic (over 200 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous (about 65 million years ago) a span of some 135 million years. When they became extinct, no relatives survived them and as a result these prehistoric animals cannot readily be compared with our modern-day fauna. So what do we know of these highly succsessful animals? The present summary answers this and many more questions based on the most recent results of modern scientific research. After a short introduction to palaeontology as a science and its history related to pterosau...
From the birth of Berlin’s railway network to the time when the bombs of the Second World War and the concrete slabs of the Wall changed the city forever, the Prussian and later German capital counted eight major railway stations. These were beacons in the city: impressive monuments, magnificently built for the bygone rituals of arrival and departure, yet tightly woven into a distinct part of town. Railway stations are magical, meaningful places, allowing for escape as well as promise, nostalgia as well as novelty. They process all sorts of people, from well-to-do business types to unfortunates forced to live on the fringes of society. There is a nervous energy around them, created by thos...
In early July 1899, an excavation team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie discovered the fossil remains in Wyoming of what was then the longest and largest dinosaur on record. Named after its benefactor, the Diplodocus carnegii—or Dippy, as it’s known today—was shipped to Pittsburgh and later mounted and unveiled at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1907. Carnegie’s pursuit of dinosaurs in the American West and the ensuing dinomania of the late nineteenth century coincided with his broader political ambitions to establish a lasting world peace and avoid further international conflict. An ardent philanthropist and patriot, Carnegie gifted his first plaster cast of...
During the 2010s, science fiction's immortal adversaries King Kong and Godzilla, representing our conflicts per Carl Sagan's "dream dragons" analogy, made comebacks in American cinema. The blockbuster Kaiju resurged onto the screen, depicting these protectors of an Earth plagued by mankind's hubris and folly. With Earth's future hanging in the balance, their climactic 2021 staging settled a score between the two giant monsters, resolving Toho's classic 1963 film King Kong vs. Godzilla. As formidable creatures emerging from Time's Tomb on Mother Earth, metaphorical Kong and Godzilla are considered here in light of new millennial environmentalism's stark reality. This book, nostalgic in tone, explores the meaning of Kong and Godzilla as planetary saviors--titanic protectors of a theoretical "living Earth" Gaia--defending the globe from a prehistoric plague of adversaries.
Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920
A lively account of how dinosaurs became a symbol of American power and prosperity and gripped the popular imagination during the Gilded Age, when their fossil remains were collected and displayed in museums financed by North America’s wealthiest business tycoons. Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated ...
Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts brings together scholars who shed light on the ways locations gave shape to scientific knowledge practices in the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary volume uses four hundred years of Dutch history as a laboratory to investigate spatialized understandings of the history of knowledge. By conceptualizing locations of knowing as time-specific configurations of actors, artefacts, and activities, contributors to this volume not only examine cities as specific kind of locations, but also analyze the regionally and globally networked and transformative character of locations. Many of the locations which are studied in this volume are still visible until the present day. Contributors are Azadeh Achbari, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Alette Fleischer, Floor Haalboom, Marijn Hollestelle, Dirk van Miert, Ilja Nieuwland, Abel Streefland, Andreas Weber, Martin Weiss, Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, and Huib Zuidervaart.
In "Commercial Visions," Daniel Margocsy shows how entrepreneurial science has been with us since the Scientific Revolution. Product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and anatomy, the big sciences of the early modern era, and the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to a transnational network of such entrepreneurial science, connecting natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in such cities as Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Danzig. These practitioners were out to do business: they bought and sold exotica, preserved specimens, anatomical prints, and botanical atlases, and in their trade relied on particularly mercan...
Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe investigates how Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia was read, interpreted and remodelled for a variety of readerships in eighteenth-century Europe. The editors, Mordechai Feingold and Elizabethanne Boran, have brought together papers which explore how, when, where and why the Principia was appropriated by readers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England and Ireland. Particular focus is laid on the methods of transmission of Newtonian ideas via university textbooks and popular works written for educated laymen and women. At the same time, challenges to the Newtonian consensus are explored by writers such as Marius Stan and Catherine Abou-Nemeh who examine Cartesian and Leibnizian responses to the Principia. Eighteenth-century attempts to remodel Newton as a heretic are explored by Feingold, while William R. Newman draws attention to vital new sources highlighting the importance of alchemy to Newton. Contributors are: Catherine Abou-Nemeh, Claudia Addabbo, Elizabethanne Boran, Steffen Ducheyne, Moredechai Feingold, Sarah Hutton, Juan Navarro-Loidi, William R. Newman, Luc Peterschmitt, Anna Marie Roos, Marius Stan, and Gerhard Wiesenfeldt.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic was one of the main centers of media in Europe. These media included newspapers, pamphlets, news digests, and engravings. Early Modern Media and the News in Europe brings together fifteen articles dealing with this early news industry in relation to politics and society, written by Joop W. Koopmans in recent decades. They demonstrate the important Dutch position within early modern news networks in Europe. Moreover, they address a variety of related themes, such as the supply of news during wars and disasters, the speed of early modern news reports, the layout of early newspapers and the news value of their advertisements, and censorship of books and news media.