Many people have guided my lifelong odyssey through science and religion. I am grateful to my brilliant pastor, the late Rev. Dr. Bruce Thielemann, who showed me that you could be religious and intellectual at the same time. I thank Dr. Don Polhemus for urging me to take Hebrew in high school and for keeping me on my toes with my “alephs” and “gimels,” and Dr. Anastasius Bandy for teaching me to read the New Testament in its original Greek. I thank my former professors in philosophy, classics, anthropology, and religion at University of California–Riverside, who helped me understand not only the Bible but also world religions and the anthropology and sociology of religion. I thank my many mentors in college and in my profession who have taught me about the fossil record, including Drs. Michael Woodburne and Michael Murphy at UC Riverside and Drs. Earl Manning, Eugene Gaffney, Niles Eldredge, James Hays, and the late Drs. Malcolm McKenna, Richard Tedford, and Bobb Schaeffer at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History. I thank the late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould for his enthusiasm and encouragement when I was a struggling grad student and young professional and for being an inspiration to all of us in paleontology. I thank the late Stanley Weinberg, who first recruited me to battle the creationists in downstate Illinois in 1983 and inspired me to create my very successful Evolution, Creation, and the Cosmos course at Knox College. I thank my colleagues Dr. Dewey Moore and the late Dr. Larry DeMott for their support at the beginning of my professional career at Knox College when I tackled the creationist issue.
I thank my many professional colleagues, who generously provided images of their fossils for this book. They are all acknowledged in the figure captions. I would especially like to thank Carl Buell for his amazing illustrations. I also thank my father, the late Clifford R. Prothero, for his original art in chapter 14. I thank Patrick Fitzgerald, publisher for the life sciences; Ryan Groendyk, editorial assistant; Leslie Kriesel, assistant managing editor; Lisa Hamm, interior designer; and Julia Kushnirsky, who designed the cover. I want to thank the staff of Cenveo Publisher Services for all they did to make this book a reality. I thank Drs. Kevin Padian, Alan Gishlick, Bruce Lieberman, and Wilfred Elders for carefully reading the entire manuscript of the first edition and for reading the second edition, and Lisa Spoon and Dr. James W. Prothero for commenting on the religious aspects of the early chapters. Finally, I thank my wonderful sons, Erik, Zachary, and Gabriel, and my amazing wife, Teresa, for their love and support during this project. They have made it all worthwhile, and I hope this book will make a better world for them in the future.