mosasaurs

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 – The Princeton Field Guide to Mesozoic Sea Reptiles

6-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, paleontology

This is the second of a two-part dive into the world of extinct marine reptiles, following on from my review of Darren Naish’s new book Ancient Sea Reptiles. These two books were in the making simultaneously, with The Princeton Field Guide to Mesozoic Sea Reptiles by independent palaeontologist and palaeoartist Gregory S. Paul making it into print four months before Naish’s book. If a field guide to extinct creatures sounds unusual, think of it as an illustrated guide for the palaeo-enthusiast that revolves around Paul’s signature skeletal reconstructions.

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Book review – Ancient Sea Reptiles: Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs & More

7-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, paleontology

The marine reptiles that roam Earth’s oceans today are but a whisper of a once vast and varied group of marine reptiles that included plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs. As palaeontologist Darren Naish shows here, there were many more, less-familiar organisms and the evolutionary history of the group as a whole is fascinating. Ancient Sea Reptiles is a richly illustrated introduction to their biology and taxonomic diversity that hits the sweet spot when it comes to scientific content, offering a substantive read. Books are a bit like buses: you wait forever and then suddenly two come along. After a dearth of books on this topic, Ancient Sea Reptiles was published just four months after Gregory S. Paul’s The Princeton Field Guide to Mesozoic Sea Reptiles. This, then, is the first of two reviews that takes a deep dive into the world of these extinct marine reptiles.

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Book review – Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea (Second Edition)

8-minute read

The deep past harbours many events, epochs, and places that are still a mystery to me. Case in point: once upon a time, North America was cut in half by an enormous ocean. Something I was only dimly aware of. Luckily, Indiana University Press’s flagship palaeontology series Life of the Past has just the book to remedy that. I may be three years late to the party, but this 2017 book provides all the details one could ask for, and then some.

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Book review – The Rise of Reptiles: 320 Million Years of Evolution

7-minute read

Reptiles are an incredibly diverse animal group with a long and complex evolutionary history, conquering land, skies, and seas multiple times. Continued discoveries of both living reptiles and fossil material are adding more details and layers to the story of their evolution. A review of how they all relate to each other has been long overdue, and geologist and curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Hans-Dieter Sues here takes on that challenge. The resulting The Rise of Reptiles is a technical and heavily illustrated reference work for the serious zoologist and palaeontologist.

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