Dinosaurs Rediscovered - Michael Benton ****

When I give talks about science in junior schools, there is one magic word that I only have to mention to get children's attention: dinosaurs. They have a fascination that may dim a little with age, but still stays with us, whether it's their dramatic side (as brought out in the Jurassic Park films) or the fascination of finding out more about a set of animals that once dominated the Earth.

Mention of Jurassic Park tends to produce grinding of teeth amongst professionals in the field - leaving aside the impossibility of the premise (thanks to the half-life of DNA, amongst other things), our understanding of what dinosaurs looked like, how they moved and lived - and far more - has transformed immensely in last 30 or so years - and yet the representations we see on the screen often hark back to an earlier vision.

Michael Benton eases us in with a chatty introduction about how science works and how we now think we know far more about the dinosaurs than was possible even ten years ago, revealing aspects such as skin pigmentation, feathers, what their biting capability was like and far more through fascinating new techniques and discoveries.

This is literally a weighty tome - at nearly 1kg I found it quite hard to hold to read for any sustained period. For me, the mix of content sometimes lacked a sense of structure and flow - we go from sort of dinosaur top trumps inserts with illustrations, specifications and a 'little-known fact' about each species, to background on their period, stories of discoveries and answers to perky little questions such as 'Were the dinosaurs warm blooded?' (short answer 'Yes and no') and 'Are birds really dinosaurs?' (short answer 'Yes'). Then we'll plunge into something quite detailed, such as bone histology, the study of the internal microscopic structure of bones.

Overall the book is often charming, verging occasionally on the whimsical (particularly in photograph captions: of a portrait of Thomas Henry Huxley, for example, we read 'did he perhaps know how smart he was'). I found it difficult to read through from end to end, finding it worked better as something to dip into on train journeys... but well worth it for a journey that was both informative and personal.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied), the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Search This Blog