This book opens a doorway to a fascinating former world, the dinosaurs and other animals that lived there, and how that world was brought to light. This world existed in Australia between 100 million and 120 million years ago, when Australia was far south of where it is located today and joined to Antarctica. Over the past two decades, it has been determined that in this polar region lived dinosaurs. This book tells the story of the discoveries that led to this surprising conclusion, of the dinosaurs and other animals that lived here, their environment, and how they adapted to this unusual place. How we have come to know about this lost world, so different from any that exists on Earth today, makes for a fascinating story. The book recounts the efforts to collect the fossils indispensable to our knowledge of this realm. It describes the work carried out in the laboratory to uncover the secrets of these fossils and to reconstruct the environment their living, breathing owners once inhabited. It describes the activities of hundreds of individual personalities who helped shaped the outcome. It is a journey of scientific adventure, full of the ambiguities of life that begins with one destination in mind and ends at another, having arrived by a most roundabout route, down byways and dead ends. It is, in short, an account of the way scientific research is actually conducted and the hard won knowledge that has been gained about this remarkable life of the past.