Steve Brusatte — A New History of Birds: From Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present
Paleontologist Steve Brusatte traces how birds evolved from dinosaurs, survived the asteroid that killed their cousins, and diversified into 14,000 species across Earth.
Why we picked this
Brusatte has the rare ability to make deep evolutionary time feel immediate — his new book on birds answers the question most people half-know the answer to (birds are dinosaurs) by showing exactly how strange and specific that lineage is.
The birds outside your window are dinosaurs — not metaphorically, but literally. They are the only lineage of dinosaurs that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, and they survived because of specific evolutionary features — feathers, beaks, large brains, warm-blooded metabolism — that their relatives never developed. Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who has named more than fifteen new dinosaur species and served as paleontology advisor for the Jurassic World films, has spent his career tracing this lineage, and A New History of Birds is his most ambitious synthesis of it.
The book ranges from the extinct: elephant birds of Madagascar, Pelagornithid seabirds with twenty-foot wingspans, and ten-foot-tall terror birds that stalked the post-asteroid world. And it extends to the living: penguins, parrots, hummingbirds — 14,000 species representing extraordinary diversification from a single surviving lineage. Brusatte explains not just what happened but how we know it, drawing on decades of fossil evidence and the molecular biology that has transformed our understanding of evolutionary relationships.
For general science audiences, Brusatte is one of the most reliable writers working today — his previous bestsellers The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals have demonstrated that deep time can be made genuinely compelling. This Town Hall Seattle evening is in-person, with a book add-on available at purchase.