Paleontology, an illustrated history

Paleontology, an illustrated history - David Bainbridge ***

I really wanted to like David Bainbridge's illustrated palaeontology book more than I did in practice. One of the few criticisms I had of Henry Gee's impressive A Very Short History of Life on Earth was its lack of illustrations. Here the illustrations are centre stage. In fact they've taken over the whole show. Much of Bainbridge's text is interesting, but I found the book almost impossible to read as practically every other time I turned a page, the flow of the writing was broken by large captions for illustrations, which felt like they were part of the main text but weren't. Rather than link the illustrations to the main text, many of them were almost standalone spreads. As a result, the design simply doesn't work very well.

That's a shame, because the text I did manage to read took an interesting course of breaking the chronologically based chapters into sections devoted to specific palaeontologists, from Smith, Anning and Darwin to Clack and Khudi. (The final chapter deviates a little from this format as there is also a section on the movie versions of King Kong and Jurassic Park, which is entertaining, if not exactly fitting with the rest.) The illustrations have a good range, but the artily subdued tones they are printed in tend to reduce the impact - this would have been better going the full Technicolor.

I suspect the structure will make this a difficult book to stick with for someone who hasn't already read a bit on the subject. As a result, I think it works best to fill in illustrated details on people and discoveries the reader has already encountered elsewhere. Not a disaster by any means, but it wouldn't have taken much to have made it significantly better.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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