Skip to main content

Dinosaurs: a field guide – Gregory S. Paul ***

This isn’t the only book with this title, indicating that the whole idea of a field guide you can take out and help in ‘spotting’ dinosaurs is rather an attractive concept, at least to publishers. I am rather doubtful in this particular case whether the book would make a good practical field guide – it is too big, coming in somewhere between a large hardback and small coffee table book in size, and there is too much introductory text.
I’d also suggest that a field guide to dinosaurs should be a book you can take out to use to spot live dinosaurs, what this book is (more practically, I admit) one that that concentrates on skeletons, and would be more appropriately described as a field guide to dinosaur skeletons.
There is no doubt that Gregory S. Paul knows his stuff, but this book falls at one of the main hurdles to producing a good popular science book – identifying who it is aimed at. Dinosaurs are incredibly popular with younger children, but the dry, detailed tone of the introductory text, which is packed with information, really wouldn’t appeal to the younger reader. Similarly, the guide pages are too detailed and slightly dusty feeling for anyone but a resting academic or older dino anorak.
The other test of how a dinosaur book is pitched is to see how it treats that favourite, the T. rex – it does get a full page picture, but the entry lacks the sort of excitement I would hope to get from such a sauric superstar. I was also slightly disappointed there was no mention – even if it were to dismiss it – off the much vaunted speculation in the last few years that T. rex was a scavenger rather than a hunter.
It is all very structured and analytical and scientific. But I’m really not sure who is going to read it, or why I would buy this rather than one of the many other dinosaur titles. Having said that, the enthusiastic reviews on Amazon suggest someone loves it – so if esoteric dino details are your thing, it’s definitely one to add to your library.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Jo Reed

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur