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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more