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

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

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...

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 ...

Search This Blog