Michael J. Benton is Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology and head of the Palaeobiology Research Group at the University of Bristol, which was identified by the Center for World University Rankings as the top palaeontology research group in the world. He has written more than fifty books, including the standard textbooks in palaeontology and When Life Nearly Died, also published by Thames & Hudson. Benton regularly offers media comment on new dinosaur discoveries.
'Undoubtedly a useful contribution to the corpus of popular books on dinosaur biology ... the narrative is consistently interesting' - School Science Review