From Fish to Man

An illustration in the book shows a snapshot of the Jehol Biota in China, where feathered dinosaurs once lived.[Photo provided to China Daily]

A bilingual book seeks to shed light on the evolution of vertebrates through the trove of fossils discovered in China. Yang Yang reports.

Jurassic World came as a mixed bag of surprises and fear. The Hollywood sci-fi feature last year gave moviegoers a new menace in the form of Indominus rex, who first faces and then destroys most of the well behaved raptors, but is later thrown into a lagoon by a Tyrannosaurus rex, which is finally eaten by a "water lizard".

Stories about dinosaurs not only help filmmakers make big bucks, they continue to fascinate people, even through nonfiction.

Now, a bilingual book written and illustrated by paleontologists from Canada, China and Australia is expected to feed readers' curiosity about the creatures that are thought to have roamed the Earth millions of years ago. From Fish to Human: The March of Vertebrate Life in China is available in both Chinese and English in the same copy.

"It's for readers in China and abroad－whoever is interested in paleontology. They will read about the latest advances in China's paleontological research," says Wang Yuan, co-author of the book and a researcher with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, an institution affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He is an expert on amphibians and reptiles.

Corwin Sullivan, co-author of the book, is Wang's colleague from the IVPP. He laughs along with Wang at their office as they together imagine a scene from what they call a future Jurassic Park movie, in which an attack is launched by a large carnivorous dinosaur covered with feathers.