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Despite their fame and reputation, dinosaurs represent only half the story of the Mesozoic Era. In Beast Companions: The Unsung Animals of the Dinosaurs'World, paleontologist John Foster explores the often-overlooked animals that coexisted with them. These ancient species, often equally remarkable as their dinosaur neighbors, can provide valuable insights into the biotic history of our planet. In some cases, these animals reveal just as much, if not more, about the extinct ecosystems of the time as the dinosaurs themselves.By drawing on a wealth of current and past discoveries, Foster embarks on a sweeping journey across 164 million years to visit the beast companions of the dinosaurs. Along the way, he examines fish, insects, the first frogs and salamanders, turtles, snakes and lizards, marine reptiles, crocodiles, pterosaurs, birds, mammals, and other animals of the Mesozoic Era.Beast Companions is a groundbreaking exploration of the story of these contemporaries of the dinosaurs that set the modern world in motion more than 200 million years ago

This book provides students and researchers with reviews of biological questions related to the evolution of feeding by vertebrates in aquatic and terrestrial environments. Based on recent technical developments and novel conceptual approaches, the book covers functional questions on trophic behavior in nearly all vertebrate groups including jawless fishes. The book describes mechanisms and theories for understanding the relationships between feeding structure and feeding behavior. Finally, the book demonstrates the importance of adopting an integrative approach to the trophic system in order to understand evolutionary mechanisms across the biodiversity of vertebrates.

The phylontogenic theory proposes an original understanding of nose, sinus and midface formation and development by looking back in evolution for the first traces of the olfactory organ and then tracing its successive phyletic transformations to become part of the respiratory apparatus and finally the central point of human facial anatomy. Von Baer's, Darwin's, Haeckel's, Garstang's, Gould's and Buss'explorations of parallels between phylogeny and ontogeny help to trace the nose and midface story. The paradigm of existing parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny proves useful both in seeking to understand the holoprosencephalic spectrum of facial malformations (which represent radically different pathways of facial development after the life's tape has been started to run again) and in formulating hypotheses on chordate to vertebrate evolution. The phylontogenic theory leads to new medical hypotheses on nose and sinus diseases and opens the field of evolution and development-based medicine.