Age of the Dinosaurs Vividly Portrayed in New Novel "Hell Creek"

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Not only a gripping story, but filled with accurate and fascinating scientific details and wonderful images. I felt closer to the Cretaceous while reading this book than when digging up Cretaceous dinosaurs today

Falmouth, MA (PRWEB) November 27, 2006

A new novel by two scientists takes the reader back in time 65 million years to an accurate and evocative depiction of the North American late Cretaceous Period. Titled Hell Creek, the book uses Montana's Hell Creek Formation as its basis.

Woods Hole, MA oceanographer Lisa M. Graziano and Princeton University neuroscientist Michael S. A. Graziano teamed up for this debut novel. Both Ph.Ds with extensive publication records, the sister and brother have received endorsements from paleontologists and fiction readers alike.

"Not only a gripping story, but filled with accurate and fascinating scientific details and wonderful images. I felt closer to the Cretaceous while reading this book than when digging up Cretaceous dinosaurs today," writes Julia Sankey, Ph.D., vertebrate paleontologist at California State University.

Hell Creek uses time travel or temporal translocation through a graviton vault in a particle physics lab to send its characters--four people and a German Shepherd--from modern-day Creekbend, South Dakota to the same location 65 million years in the past. Beginning on the white sands of a too-idyllic beach, the characters, and the reader, embark on a thousand-mile trek from the Epicontinental Sea to the foothills of the infant Rocky Mountains.

During two months of travel by river and over land, the survivors encounter a host of Cretaceous vegetation, dinosaurs, mammals, reptiles, and of course terrain, all vastly different from the modern South Dakota and Montana. And while they are struggling on, present-day investigators, led by Creekbend's female police chief, try to solve the mystery of an empty, damaged lab--empty, that is, except for the lower half of a human body.

"The Grazianos' time-travel-to-the-Cretaceous is a fresh take on a classic idea, a solid imaginative feat, and a treat on many levels…a page-turner, starting off fast and never letting up… The dinosaurs and other prehistoric goodies are alive, specific, extraordinarily available to the senses," writes Mary Patterson Thornburg, author and book reviewer.

Hell Creek, although it pulls in tidbits of paleontology, the philosophy of science, and evolution, is aimed at readers of popular fiction, adventure, and science fiction.

"The Grazianos really know their stuff… The genuine science in Hell Creek--paleontology, geology, evolution, natural history--is rendered with clarity and vividness and gives the novel its richness. Hell Creek is plain fun, and educational at that. Short of time travel, this is as close as you'll ever get to the silent, grim, predatory world of the Cretaceous," writes John T. Hough, Jr. in a Falmouth Enterprise book review.

For reviews, press releases, excerpts, author appearances, information on the Hell Creek Formation, and other material, visit http://www.hellcreek.org.

Hell Creek is available at http://www.hellcreek.org, http://www.amazon.com, and http://www.barnesandnoble.com. It may also be found at the upcoming meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December.

Book information:

Hell Creek: sixty-five million years in the past, the adventure begins

L. M. Graziano and M. S. A Graziano

2006 Trafford Publishing

ISBN: 1-4120-9238-8

Softcover

Pages: 282

Size: 5.5 x 8.5

Contact:

Lisa M. Graziano

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