Dinosaurs - Michael Benton ***

Books on dinosaurs are sure sellers for the children's market, but it's a tougher prospect for adults. The danger is that a dino book becomes something between a trainspotting exercise and top trumps, listing different dinosaurs' capabilities and characteristics without really telling us anything of interest. It's an exercise in the philatelic end of Rutherford's infamous takedown of science as being either physics or stamp collecting.

Having said that, it's not impossible to make an adult book on dinosaurs that is engaging. For example, Donald Prothero's The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries overcame the problem by driving the book from the stories of the discoverers of the relevant fossils, while Benton's previous book Dinosaurs Rediscovered, while not quite at the same level, managed to do better than the average by focussing on new discoveries like skin pigmentation and feathers while dipping into some topics in detail and taking a charming, if occasionally over-whimsical, approach.

In some ways, this new title (fully 'Dinosaurs - new visions of a lost world') is very much more of the same to Dinosaurs Rediscovered, down to the book being rather heavier than is comfortable for the reader's wrists. Once again, it focuses on the newer discoveries - those pigments and feathers again, for example - and presenting the best picture we can of how we now think dinosaurs looked and behaved. In part you could see it as an updated versions of the already dated TV show 'Walking with Dinosaurs' in book form. It shares the strengths and weaknesses of that series. It does help bring some aspects of dinosaurs to life, but it sometimes sounds as if it's describing fact, rather than best current conjecture given the limited data we have.

In total, the book covers 15 species, most of which are relatively unfamiliar with the exception of archaeopteryx, the well-known proto-bird. There's no t-rex or velociraptor, which is distinctly refreshing. There are plenty of illustrations, both photographic and in coloured artworks, produced by 'palaeoartist' Bob Nicholls, which includes the remarkable looking tupandactylus (technically a pterosaur rather than a dinosaur) featured on the cover. This one is surely just waiting to star in its own animated movie.

The book is certainly quite interesting in a QI sense, but I struggled to keep engaged enough to bother too much after getting through three or four species. In the end, I'm more physicist than stamp collector in my attitude to science. This no doubt makes it my fault that I didn't get more out of this book - but other dinosaur titles have captured my attention more effectively. It is, however, a good addition to the collection of adults who delight in dinosaurs.

Hardback:

Bookshop.org

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

Search This Blog