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Hi Kirstin, ha, what a coincidence! I have to bridge almost 30 years to think back to what the reading level of my own 11-year-old self was, so this is helpful to know. 🙂

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Thank you so much for this! He’s reading The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs right now! He’s finding it manageable but JUST manageable and from your excerpt, The Dinosaurs Rediscovered feels a little out of his reach. This is great help, thank you. I’ll give it a couple of years 🙂

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Hi Kirstin, thanks for the question! I have just pulled my copy of the shelf and did some spot checks. I don’t have children myself, but I would say that the language is not ridiculously academic. Benton is a good communicator. Here’s a quote from page 115 to give you a taste, describing the academic discussion around the bird-dinosaur link:

“Nonetheless, since these early papers by Ostrom, Bakker and Galton, there has been a remarkably vocal crew of nay-sayers who continue to express a counter view until well into the twenty-first century, and will doubtless carry on doing so. They have survived on the ‘balanced’ airtime given by scientific documentaries – ‘here’s one view; and here’s the other’. Never mind that the bird-dinosaur view is supported by hundreds of independent bits of evidence and the ‘birds are not dinosaurs’ view lacks an alternative theory and lacks evidence. This might be the one negative aspect of the great public interest in advances in dinosaur science: the fact that proponents of rejected views can promote their ideas directly to the public even if the scientific journals, with their systems of scrupulous peer review, no longer accept their papers. ”

Another book I would recommend on that note, published at about the same time, is Steve Brusatte’s “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs”, which I reviewed as well (/2018/05/04/book-review-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-dinosaurs-the-untold-story-of-a-lost-world/). Also very accessibly written. Here’s what he has to say on the same topic (p. 300):

“During the tens of millions of years that dinosaurs were evolving the signature features of birds one by one, there was no long game, no greater aim. There was no force guiding evolution to make these dinosaurs ever more adapted to the skies. Evolution works only in the moment, naturally selecting in its particular time and place. Flight was something that just kind of happened when the time was right. It may have even gotten to the point where it was inevitable. If evolution manufactures a small, long-armed, big-brained hunter with feathers to keep warm and wings to woo mates, it doesn’t take very much for that animal to start flapping around in the air.”

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