More than fifty million years ago, three giant lakes covered what is now Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, surrounded by lush forests, a subtropical landscape teeming with animal and plant life. One of the first primates made its home there, as did more than 2,000 species of insect and countless bats. Now that region is dry and rocky, a desert too harsh to support much beyond scrub vegetation. But for the past 150 years, paleontologists—amateurs and professionals alike—have been digging up astonishing traces of that vanished splendor, and in The Lost World of Fossil Lake, the world’s foremost expert on the Fossil Butte and Green River discoveries reveals their picture of the prehistoric past in all its splendor.

Marrying an insider’s history of the excavations at Fossil Butte with marvelous full-color photos of hundreds of fossils, Lance Grande reveals a fossil world preserved in astonishingly lifelike fashion. We see species frozen, Pompeii-like, in the midst of interaction, view embryos fossilized in utero, find plants and animals intermixed as they would have been in their ancient environment. Together they make this long-extinct community come to life in all its diversity and splendor.

Lance Grande is a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, and the author of more than one hundred books and scientific articles. He is available for interviews.

Please contact Levi Stahl at (773) 702-0289 or lstahl@press.uchicago.edu for more information.