Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway

Paleobotanist Kirk Johnson and artists Ray Troll take an epic road trip through fossil beds & museums of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah and New Mexico, describing & drawing the flora, fauna & geology of the lands that were buried under the Great Plains and then uplifted back into surface proximity by the Rocky Mountains. Troll's artwork steals the show. If you've seen his shirts you now the distinctive style. Sadly, either I got a bit inured or the book just tails off a bit toward the end, where it feels more like a mad dash to get back to Denver on time than the more thoughtful gee-whiz exploration that it starts off as. This is the recently published second edition, and a lot of the narrative has been updated to reflect happenings since the original publication in 2007.