Skip to main content

Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior *** - David Hone

TV nature programmes leave me cold, but I was quite interested in Walking with Dinosaurs, which arguably picked up on the impact of Jurassic Park to give us a vivid visual exploration of dino life. The main problem with it was that the makers made assertions as if fact that could not have been more than hypothesis about the details of dinosaur appearance and behaviour, so the subtitle of this book 'What they did and how we know' (my italics) really caught my attention.

To be honest, my first thoughts were not wholly positive when in the first page of chapter 1 I read 'Throughout this book I will refer to dinosaurs and Dinosauria as a paraphyletic group' - although David Hone goes on with 'therefore excluding both Mesozoic and modern birds unless explicitly stated otherwise' - most potential readers, like me probably still aren't really clear what paraphyletic means. This is sold as for the general public, but a more care with the editing might have ensured that it avoided some of the unnecessary terminology biologists and palaeontologists are distictly fond of. 

I'll only give one more example 'The archosaurs are united in the presence of an antorbital fenestra' - good to know. Hone then gives a definition of this term, but why did we need to know it in the first place? Unnecessary labelling, as Richard Feynman pointed out, is the bane of biology when trying to communicate with a wider audience.

Without doubt, Hone does go on to provide some fascinating information on dinosaur behaviour, deduced from a combination of the fossil record and the behaviour, for example, of their living descendants, the birds and even of many vaguely equivalent mammals. This does sometimes still feel distinctly speculative, but (unlike the TV show) the wording largely indicates where this is the case, with comments like 'dinosaurs likely had excellent color vision' rather than stating it as fact. In a nod to the non-academic audience there are some attractive colour plates by Gabriel Ugueto, though these are collected together in the old-fashioned way, and as a result don't relate easily to the text.

I really wanted to like this book, and it does without doubt give a whole range of insights from use of camouflage to the purpose of Stegosaurus tail spikes. But the writing style really lets it down. It used to be that I often had to say that an academic author would benefit from a professional writer as co-author. This is far less the case these days, with some excellent academic popular science writers, but unfortunately it does apply here.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more