palaeontology

Book review – The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (Third Edition)

10-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, paleontology

If you have ever seen a diagram of a dinosaur skeleton in a book or scientific paper—white bones, black silhouette, I am looking at you—odds are that it was drawn by independent palaeontologist and palaeoartist Gregory S. Paul, or at the very least inspired by his work. As a consultant and illustrator-for-hire, he has been researching and drawing these diagrams for over 40 years, and The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs brings together the largest such collection in print. I have previously reviewed his companion volumes on pterosaurs and extinct marine reptiles, which is coming at it somewhat the wrong way around. His tenure with Princeton University Press started back in 2010 with the first edition of this dinosaur guide, followed by the second edition in 2016, and the third edition in May 2024. High time, thus, to make up for that lack of review coverage. In the process, I will address the question of whether buyers of the second edition should upgrade.

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Book review – On the Wing: Insects, Pterosaurs, Birds, Bats and the Evolution of Animal Flight

8-minute read
keywords: biomechanics, evolutionary biology, paleontology

Flight fascinates me for two reasons: one is pure envy at being earthbound, and the other because it is a fantastic example of convergent evolution, having evolved not once, but on four separate occasions. Last year I was sent Lev Parikian’s book Taking Flight and in finally reviewing that, I took the opportunity to also read David E. Alexander’s 2015 book On the Wing. A very accessible popular science book that tells the intriguing story of the evolution of flight, it helpfully assumes little background knowledge of either evolution or biomechanics. This, then, is the first of a two-part review of how life got airborne.

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Book review – Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know

7-minute read
keywords: ethology, paleontology

I have written previously that deducing behaviour of extinct animals from fossils millions of years old might seem science fiction, but is very much science fact. That said, in his previous book, English palaeontologist David Hone pointed out that dinosaur behaviour is the one area where we see the greatest disconnect between what we know and what people think we know. His new book Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior is a sobering reality check for the lay reader, but I suspect that even palaeontologists might come away wondering whether there is anything we know for sure. Concise, well-structured, and beautifully illustrated by palaeoartist Gabriel Ugueto, this is a superb book that transcends “merely” being a good popular science work by also addressing professional palaeontologists.

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Book review – The Future of Dinosaurs: What We Don’t Know, What We Can, and What We’ll Never Know

8-minute read
keywords: paleontology

There are plenty of popular palaeontology books that tell you everything we know about dinosaurs and several excellent examples have been reviewed here in the past. For the 500th review on this blog, I take the road less travelled. In The Future of Dinosaurs, English palaeontologist David Hone flips the script by asking what we do not know about dinosaurs. I have been meaning to review this book since it was first published in 2022. With the recent publication of his latest popular book on dinosaur behaviour, I decided to make time and read up on Hone’s work. First up, an exploration of our ignorance that is as much a celebration of all we have learned and how we have learned it.

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Book review – Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould

7-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, history of science, paleontology

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was a well-known evolutionary biologist, palaeontologist, and science populariser. Amongst his many achievements stand the 300 popular essays that appeared from 1974 to 2001 in the magazine Natural History, published by the American Museum of Natural History. Many of these were collected in bestselling volumes that have been reprinted repeatedly. To celebrate this legacy of essays, his friends and close colleagues Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, themselves evolutionary biologists and palaeontologists of considerable renown, here present thirteen of their own essays that do exactly what the subtitle promises. They entertain as often as they intrigue in a collection that draws serious and, looking at the chapter titles, sometimes not-so-serious connections between macroevolution and palaeontology on the one hand, and popular culture, philosophy, and the history of science on the other. To my shame, I have to admit that I have never read Gould’s essays or his many books (while having several on my shelves). Macroevolutionaries convinced me that this gap in my knowledge needs closing.

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Book review – A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils

6-minute read
keywords: paleontology

Giving an overview of all of dino-dom in just 50 fossils and a mere 160 pages might seem like a tall order. Fortunately, palaeontologist Paul M. Barrett, a Merit Researcher in the Earth Science Department of the London Natural History Museum (NHM), is no stranger to writing popular works on dinosaurs. This handsomely illustrated hardback will do well in the museum’s gift shop.

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Book review – Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter

7-minute read
keywords: art, biography, paleontology

Jay Matternes is one of the more underrecognized palaeoarists. Born in 1933, he has laboured away as a freelance artist in relative obscurity for over six decades. In 2020, I reviewed Visions of Lost Worlds which celebrated the six large prehistoric mammal murals he painted for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. I concluded that review by asking about the rest of his career and suggested this was an area ripe for a biographer. Little did I know that such a book was already in the making and it flew under my radar[1] until very recently. As if the prospect of more artwork by Matternes was not enough, when I saw that it was authored by Richard Milner, who wrote the de-facto career retrospective of renowned palaeoartist Charles R. Knight, I was positively salivating. To say that I am pleased with the result would be putting it mildly.

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Book review – The Trilobite Collector’s Guide

7-minute read
keywords: fossils, paleontology, trilobites

Following on from this 2022 book Travels with Trilobites, fossil collector and trilobite enthusiast Andy Secher returns with The Trilobite Collector’s Guide. Leaning fully into his background as a long-time editor of hard rock magazine Hit Parader, he here presents 52 chapters with top 10 lists that present a medley of trilobite facts and factoids. As before, this book is chock-a-block with many previously unseen colour photos of these fossilised arthropods, showcasing their tremendous morphological variation. In the spirit of this book, here are my top 10 observations on The Trilobite Collector’s Guide.

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Book review – Ocean Life in the Time of Dinosaurs

5-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, paleontology

In this review, I am revisiting the spectacular diversity of marine reptiles that flourished in the planet’s oceans and waterways during the time of the dinosaurs. After having gone without popular titles on the subject for almost two decades since Richard Ellis’s Sea Dragons in 2005, suddenly we have three. Last year April-May I reviewed Ancient Sea Reptiles and The Princeton Field Guide to Mesozoic Sea Reptiles, and mentioned that this book was in the works. Ocean Life in the Time of Dinosaurs was originally published in French in 2021 as La Mer au Temps des Dinosaures by Belin/Humensis and has been translated into English by Mark Epstein. Technically speaking that makes it the first of this recent crop, though the English translation was only published in November 2023, after the aforementioned two works. It brings together four French palaeontologists and one natural history illustrator for a graphics-heavy introduction. So, what is in this book, and how does it compare?

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Book review – An Illustrated Guide to Dinosaur Feeding Biology

8-minute read
keywords: anatomy, biomechanics, paleontology

Having just reviewed a general illustrated introduction to dinosaur behaviour, I indicated wanting to go deeper. An Illustrated Guide to Dinosaur Feeding Biology provides in spades. This technical book gives a detailed and substantial taxon-by-taxon overview of what dinosaur skulls, jaws, and teeth reveal about what, but especially how dinosaurs ate. This is a welcome survey of an otherwise scattered literature that will be invaluable for specialists.

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