From Fish to Man

A new bilingual book showcases China's latest paleontological research.[Photo provided to China Daily]

"It would be like a huge killer chicken," the Canadian paleontologist says.

Feathered dinosaurs weren't part of the first movie in the series because the original novel, Jurassic Park, published in 1990, came out before the first known fossil of a feathered dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx prima, was discovered. That happened in China six years later, he says.

The scientists then point to a small, fluffy, long-tailed dinosaur that appears in From Fish to Human.

Sullivan wrote the English version of the book, while Wang translated it into Chinese and Brian Choo drew some of the beautiful illustrations, including one based on the earliest fish fossils－which existed more than 530 million years ago－that were discovered in Chengjiang county in Southwest China's Yunnan province in 1984.

"I was trying to write in a way that you wouldn't have to be already familiar with a lot of the concepts and terminology to understand the book," Sullivan says.

Scientists say that the first vertebrate on Earth appeared in the sea and, hundreds of millions of years ago, the first curious fish made its entry on land. Eventually, fish evolved into other species－frogs, snakes, dinosaurs, birds and humans.

In the book, Sullivan writes: "As greatly modified lobefined fish, we humans stroll about on our pelvic fins and use our pectoral fins to turn the pages of books like the one you are reading now."