Similarly, he introduces important historical figures such as, of course, Marsh and Cope, whose infamous rivalry known as the Bone Wars has been detailed in books such as The Bonehunters’ Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age or The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between ED Cope and OC Marsh and the Rise of American Science. Never too chatty of forcedly funny, these anecdotes are woven in skillfully and are relevant to the story at hand. “ Brusatte excels at making current scientific methods that have been crucial in the study of dinosaurs understandable”īrusatte livens up the science with enthusiastic stories of discoveries in the field and the many talented palaeontologists he has worked with. The reign of the dinosaurs may be over, but Brusatte reminds us that some dinosaurs survived and are still with us today as birds, on which much more in The Ascent of Birds: How Modern Science is Revealing their Story. rex and the Crater of Doom, and the various lines of evidence leading up to it. Brusatte ends with the Cretaceous mass extinction, Alvarez’s impact hypothesis, detailed in T. Two chapters introduce the tyrannosaurs and its most famous representative: Tyrannosaurus rex, which Hone details further in The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs.Īnd then there is the evolution of flight and the fantastic fossil discoveries of feathered dinosaurs in recent decades (some good entry-level books are Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds or Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds). We meet the sauropods, gigantic long-necked herbivores, and the various theropod carnivores that terrorised them. After the end-Triassic mass extinction, the dinosaurs were left standing and rose to dominance during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. He talks us through the Triassic, when all the world was united in the supercontinent Pangaea, small dinosaurs competed with early mammal relatives, and the world was ruled by a reptilian sister group that would leave us the crocodiles. As in Martin’s The Evolution Underground, Brusatte advances the idea that underground burrows were crucial to survival.īrusatte introduces the dinosauromorphs, the close evolutionary forebears of the dinosaurs. Brannen’s recent book The Ends of the World did a marvellous job introducing the five major mass extinctions, but Brusatte can be equally evocative in his descriptions. Ordered roughly chronologically, it starts off with the Permian mass extinction some 252 million years ago. The current book, however, is a pop-science account of these fascinating reptiles. The film changed the whole potential of the field, and we’re reaping the benefits of that because there are so many people of my generation all around the world that were so enthused by the film.“ The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World”, written by Steve Brusatte, published in Europe by Macmillan in April 2018 (hardback, 404 pages)īrusatte has previously authored the textbook Dinosaur Paleobiology. I think dinosaur paleontology right now would still be a really niche discipline, with only a handful of people around the world studying it, and probably not a very diverse group of people. So I do think there is a really, really good chance I wouldn’t have my job today if the book was never written, if the movie was never made. A lot of my colleagues got jobs specifically because of Jurassic Park, because a museum of university wanted to hire a paleontologist after that. A lot of universities put out courses, and a lot more interest and money in the field. It reignited this interest in dinosaurs, and that led directly to a lot of museums putting out dinosaur exhibits. It was so different than the dinosaurs I read about in my books in school, and that was great. This introduced dinosaurs to a whole new generation, and this newer image of dinosaurs as an active, energetic, and intelligent animal. That led to an explosion of public interest in dinosaurs. I think the first Jurassic Park was the best thing that’s ever happened to dinosaur paleontology.
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