Australia's Lost World

Australia's Lost World PDF Author: Michael Archer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253339140
Category : Animals, Fossil
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In Queensland, in northeast Australia, lies one of the most significant fossil deposits in the world—Riversleigh. Here, the remains of many thousands of weird and wonderful prehistoric animals have been superbly preserved in the limestone outcrops. There are marsupial lions, carnivorous kangaroos, 23-foot long pythons, primitive platypuses, and early ancestors of the now extinct Tasmanian tiger. So important is this site to our understanding of what has happened to Australia and its living cargo over the last 25 million years that Riversleigh has been inscribed on the World Heritage List. Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand, and Henk Godthelp, the principal scientists on a remarkable excavation since 1976, explain the vast environmental and geographic changes that have occurred in this area since Australia broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana, and how the animals on board this continental raft evolved through the ages. Photographs and evocative artwork bring to life the teeming tropical world that once existed in the now arid wastes of Riversleigh, and the authors discuss some of the unusual techniques used on a dig. They describe how to recognize fossils, how to date them, and how to reconstruct extinct animals from them. Originally published as Riversleigh: The Story of Animals in Ancient Rainforests of Inland Australia, this award-winning book is being issued for the first time in the United States.

Australia's Lost World

Australia's Lost World PDF Author: Michael Archer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253339140
Category : Animals, Fossil
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Queensland, in northeast Australia, lies one of the most significant fossil deposits in the world—Riversleigh. Here, the remains of many thousands of weird and wonderful prehistoric animals have been superbly preserved in the limestone outcrops. There are marsupial lions, carnivorous kangaroos, 23-foot long pythons, primitive platypuses, and early ancestors of the now extinct Tasmanian tiger. So important is this site to our understanding of what has happened to Australia and its living cargo over the last 25 million years that Riversleigh has been inscribed on the World Heritage List. Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand, and Henk Godthelp, the principal scientists on a remarkable excavation since 1976, explain the vast environmental and geographic changes that have occurred in this area since Australia broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana, and how the animals on board this continental raft evolved through the ages. Photographs and evocative artwork bring to life the teeming tropical world that once existed in the now arid wastes of Riversleigh, and the authors discuss some of the unusual techniques used on a dig. They describe how to recognize fossils, how to date them, and how to reconstruct extinct animals from them. Originally published as Riversleigh: The Story of Animals in Ancient Rainforests of Inland Australia, this award-winning book is being issued for the first time in the United States.

People of the River

People of the River PDF Author: Grace Karskens
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 195253559X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 810

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Book Description
A landmark history of Australia's first successful settler farming area, which was on the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. Award-winning historian Grace Karskens uncovers the everyday lives of ordinary people in the early colony, both Aboriginal and British. Winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Australian History 2021 Winner of the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize 2021 Co-winner of the Ernest Scott Prize for History 2021 'A masterpiece of historical writing that takes your breath away' - Tom Griffiths 'A majestic book' - John Maynard 'Shimmering prose' - Tiffany Shellam Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, is where the two early Australias - ancient and modern - first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots. The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain's felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, a community that nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life. The Aboriginal people had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years. Their history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from this river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin's Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today. The Hawkesbury-Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.

The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England

The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England PDF Author: Graham Robb
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
"[An] entertaining work of geographical sleuthing.…Surprises abound." —The New Yorker An oft-overlooked region lies at the heart of British national history: the Debatable Land. The oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain, the Debatable Land once served as a buffer between England and Scotland. It was once the bloodiest region in the country, fought over by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James V. After most of its population was slaughtered or deported, it became the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the control of the state. Today, its boundaries have vanished from the map and are matters of myth and generational memories. In The Debatable Land, historian Graham Robb recovers the history of this ancient borderland in an exquisite tale that spans Roman, Medieval, and present-day Britain. Rich in detail and epic in scope, The Debatable Land provides a crucial, missing piece in the puzzle of British history.

Plague Island

Plague Island PDF Author: Justin D'Ath
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780143307303
Category : Adventure stories
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Colt is on the trail of two of the last regent firebirds in the world, who have been birdnapped by a foreign billionaire. But during the chase to rescue them, he loses the most important thing in the world - his best friend, Birdy. What follows is a wild ride involving a sea plane, a mysterious stranger, an uninhabited island, and a colony of ghost rats who are acting very strangely... Will Colt and Birdy make it home alive--Back cover.

Animal Planet: The Lost World Circus Book 6

Animal Planet: The Lost World Circus Book 6 PDF Author: Justin D'Ath
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
ISBN: 1742535933
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
An electrifying new series from Justin D'Ath, author of the bestselling Extreme Adventures. Colt Lawless is on the run, suddenly famous, and more than a little superhuman. But can he save the last animals on earth? The deadly rat flu virus has changed – humans are catching it and nobody is sure why. Officer Katt is trying to blame it on the Lost World Circus and it's up to Colt to prove her wrong. But he and Birdy are trapped in the sewers, and the man who holds the key to it all is being held prisoner at DoRFE Headquarters. Is this the end of the road –not just for the circus, but for all of humankind?

Michael Crichton's Jurassic World

Michael Crichton's Jurassic World PDF Author: Michael Crichton
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN: 9780375401077
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 824

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Book Description
Now at last in one volume, Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World--the two incomparably suspenseful, supremely scary, utterly unputdownable, worldwide best-selling return-of-the-dinosaurs novels, which together constitute Jurassic World.

Gold

Gold PDF Author: Iain McCalman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521805957
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Throughout history, gold has been the stuff of legends, fortunes, conflict and change. The discovery of gold in Australia150 years ago precipitated enormous developments in the newly settled land. The population and economy boomed in spontaneous cities. The effects on both the environment and indigenous Aboriginal peoples have been profound and lasting. In this book, a team of prominent historians and curators have collaborated to produce an innovative cultural history of gold and its impact on the development of Australian society.

Lost World of the Kimberley

Lost World of the Kimberley PDF Author: Ian Wilson
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Academic
ISBN: 9781741143911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Where did they come from? And how and when did they arrive in Australia? Little-known, difficult to reach, yet vital to this question are literally thousands of rock paintings, some believed to be as much as 50,000 years old, surviving high up in raised small caves on cliff faces in the remote and rugged Kimberley Ranges of North-West Australia. Known as 'Bradshaws', after pioneer farmer Joseph Bradshaw who chanced upon the first examples in 1891, they feature lithe, graceful human figures depicted in a fashion altogether different from that of even the oldest traditional art. Indeed, present-day Aborigines disown them, insisting that the paintings are from 'before our time' and dismissing them as 'rubbish' art.But just who were the people depicted in these Kimberley rock paintings? The paintings indicate a people with seafaring traditions, and this 'first wave' of pre-historic migrants to Australia could have a number of alternative origins.Ian Wilson describes the early work on the Bradshaw Paintings, and explains how new dating techniques have shed new light on the findings. He explores the theories advanced for the origins of these people; one possibility is settlement from the Andaman Islands, where pygmy-like tribes still survive and speak a language closely related to some original languages. Farther afield still the author draws connections with Saharan peoples, and he even unearths startling similarities with South American tribes. He claims that even the boomerang is not peculiar to Australia, but can be traced in other, potentially earlier, pre-historic communities.Recalling the early work of Thor Heyerdahl, this will be a wide-ranging and provocative book. It was the author's enthusiasms for art, art history and archaeology which sparked his interest in the Turin Shroud, leading to two international bestsellers, and he now applies these same enthusiasms to the very Australian (yet also potentially international) mystery of the Kimberley rock

Atlas of a Lost World

Atlas of a Lost World PDF Author: Craig Childs
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307908666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
From the author of Apocalyptic Planet comes a vivid travelogue through prehistory, that traces the arrival of the first people in North America at least twenty thousand years ago and the artifacts that tell of their lives and fates. In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were. How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era. The lower sea levels of the Ice Age exposed a vast land bridge between Asia and North America, but the land bridge was not the only way across. Different people arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. The continent they reached had no people but was inhabited by megafauna—mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters—Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey—but they were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals. Atlas of a Lost World chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans’ chances for survival. A blend of science and personal narrative reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Across unexplored landscapes yet to be peopled, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.

White Vanishing

White Vanishing PDF Author: Elspeth Tilley
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 9401208700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The story of the vulnerable white person vanishing without trace into the harsh Australian landscape is a potent and compelling element in multiple genres of mainstream Australian culture. It has been sung in “Little Boy Lost,” brought to life on the big screen in Picnic at Hanging Rock, immortalized in Henry Lawson’s poems of lost tramps, and preserved in the history books’ tales of Leichhardt or Burke and Wills wandering in mad circles. A world-wide audience has also witnessed the many-layered and oddly strident nature of Australian disappearance symbolism in media coverage of contemporary disappearances, such as those of Azaria Chamberlain and Peter Falconio. White Vanishing offers a revealing and challenging re-examination of Australian disappearance mythology, exposing the political utility at its core. Drawing on wide-ranging examples of the white-vanishing myth, the book provides evidence that disappearance mythology encapsulates some of the most dominant and durable categories at the heart of white Australian culture, and that many of those ideas have their origin in colonial mechanisms of inequality and oppression. White Vanishing deliberately (and perhaps controversially) reminds readers that, while power is never absolute or irresistible, some narrative threads carry a particularly authoritative inheritance of ideas and power-relations through time.