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.

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