Skip to main content

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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more