In 2000, Indiana University Press published “Dinosaurs of Darkness,” the now award-winning book by Dr. Thomas H. Rich and Dr. Patricia Vickers-Rich in which they recounted their search for and discovery of a number of remarkable fossil remains left by the dinosaurs that inhabited the Earth’s southern polar region one-hundred-twenty-million to one-hundred-million years ago.
As regular readers know, when I am “looking for the entry-way” into a new subject – be it scientific, cultural, political, or what-have-you – I often seek out one of the remarkably handy Very Short Introductions series volumes from Oxford University Press. However sometimes the perspective I’m seeking on a new subject is not necessarily one of of it as a scholarly area of study but rather one of it as a topic of public discussion or debate. In these cases I turn to another Oxford University Press series, their What Everyone Needs to Know books.
For as long as its existence has been known, the frozen continent at the bottom of the world has variously been the much sought-after prize of explorers, scientists, conservationists and politicians; often at the same time.