Tropical Arctic : the science and art of lost landscapes

An illustrated visit to the tropical arctic of 205 million years ago when Greenland was green. While today's Greenland is largely covered in ice, in the time of the dinosaurs the area was a lushly forested, tropical zone. Tropical Arctic tracks a ten-million-year window of Earth's history when global temperatures soared and the vegetation of the world responded. A project over eighteen years in the making, Tropical Arctic is the result of a unique collaboration between two paleobotanists, Jennifer C. McElwain and Ian J. Glasspool, and award-winning scientific illustrator Marlene Hill Donnelly. They began with a simple question: "What was the color of a fossilized leaf?" Tropical Arctic answers that question and more, allowing readers to experience Triassic Greenland through three reconstructed landscapes and an expertly researched catalog of extinct plants. A stunning compilation of paint and pencil art, photos, maps, and engineered fossil models, Tropical Arctic blends art and science to bring a lost world to life. Readers will also enjoy a front-row seat to the scientific adventures of life in the field, with engaging anecdotes about analyzing fossils and learning to ward off polar bear attacks. Tropical Arctic explains our planet's story of environmental upheaval, mass extinction, and resilience. By looking at Earth's past, we see a glimpse of the future of our warming planet—and learn an important lesson for our time of climate change. "Today, Greenland is largely covered in ice, but, in the time of the dinosaurs, the area was lushly forested. This book shows that landscape from 250 million years ago-and explains accessibly how we can create images of lost plants from studies of fossils, current flora, and models. Incorporating stories from their fieldwork and studio, two scientists and an artist offer the opportunity to see how paleobotanists work and to learn the science required to travel back to the Triassic. The book also offers a warning about the future; the Greenland depicted here was made possible by a large concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere. Though beautiful, this is not a habitat that most humans would survive." -- Provided by publisher