Brusatte includes anecdotes from his own dinosaur-obsessed childhood and his fieldwork and research, as well as descriptions of other historical and modern paleontologists responsible for various discoveries.

[1] A review in The Times described him as "a man who ranks as one of the leading experts in his field: a palaeontologist who seems to have studied with all the greats and to have dug up fossils everywhere that matters.

He wanted to write an up-to-date book on "the whole evolutionary story of dinosaurs" that would fill that niche and cover new discoveries, which hadn't been written about in that format.

He discusses various discoveries of feathered dinosaurs, how the scientific consensus came to agree that they were the ancestors of modern birds, and the evolution of wings and flight.

The last chapter deals with the end of the dinosaurs, with a detailed description of the first few days after the asteroid impact that scientists now believe caused their extinction and the longer-term climate effects.

Writing for the London Review of Books, Francis Goodling comments on the epilogue that "dinosaurs frequently appear as an ambiguous proxy for contemporary human concerns ... here Brusatte is no different from his predecessors.

[9] Holland called it a "readable and up-to-date survey of the current state of palaeontological knowledge" which "grippingly ... demonstrates the quickening pace of research" and "the best book on the subject written for the general reader since Robert Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies back in the 1980s.

[4] This split reviewers, with Steve Donoghue at the Christian Science Monitor finding the stories "interesting and amusing"[1] and Ira Flatow writing for The New York Times saying they "made the book special",[11] while Moody writes that "there are too many humdrum anecdotes that involve Brusatte jogging to catch trains in foreign countries, or men sitting in the desert drinking beer, or men standing around in conference centres drinking spirits.