extinction

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 – Lost Wonders: 10 Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century

10-minute read
keywords: wildlife conservation

Whether you embrace the concept or think that we are on the cusp of it, the term “Sixth Extinction” serves as a useful shorthand to bring into focus the scale and tempo of recent and ongoing biodiversity loss. Famous victims such as the dodo, the thylacine, the passenger pigeon, or the great auk will immediately jump to mind, but they are just the tip of the iceberg of extinction. Few people will think of the St. Helena olive, the Bramble Cay melomys, or the Christmas Island forest skink. And therein lies the problem: behind the faceless statistics of loss lie numerous stories of unique evolutionary lineages that have been snuffed out. In this emotional gut punch of a book, author and journalist Tom Lathan takes the unconventional approach of examining ten species that have gone extinct since 2000, nine of which you will likely never have heard of. Lathan momentarily resurrects them to examine what led to their loss and speaks to the people who tried to save them.

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Book review – Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back

9-minute read
keywords: wildlife conservation

Can the environmental and wildlife conservation movements learn from the (distant) past? This turns out to be a fraught question, with many practitioners preferring to preach pragmatism over nostalgia. Journalist and writer Sophie Yeo agrees that there is no turning back time, but this is no reason to ignore history. In Nature’s Ghosts, she mixes several parts reportage with one part nature writing to both criticize different conservation approaches and showcase some really interesting research. Though centred on the UK, she also discusses projects and problems in Europe and the USA, and the book was deservedly shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation[1].

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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 – Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World

7-minute read
keywords: biogeochemistry, ecology

What a killer title. Rarely have I seen three snappy words so effectively capture the essence of a concept in biology. What concept is that? Zoogeochemistry. Many scientists have convincingly made the case that it is the small things that run the world. Though it is undeniably true that e.g. microbes and insects have shaped our planet, and continue to do so, it would be a mistake to think that larger animals are just along for the ride. I was stoked the moment the announcement for this book dropped and conservation biologist and marine ecologist Joe Roman did not disappoint. Eat, Poop, Die is fun and fascinating, while always keeping one eye firmly on the facts and complexities of ecology. Is it too soon to start earmarking titles for this year’s top 5? I think not.

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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 – Of Cockroaches and Crickets: Learning to Love Creatures That Skitter and Jump

5-minute read
keywords: entomology

Of all the insects that have a PR problem, cockroaches must rank very high. That, however, did not stop German entomologist, journalist, and filmmaker Frank Nischk from spending a year-long internship studying them. In this book, he regales the reader with stories of his time in the lab and the field studying first cockroaches and later crickets. A light and breezy read despite the serious undercurrent of biodiversity decline, Of Cockroaches and Crickets turned out to be an entertaining read.

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Book review – Dinosaurs – 10 Things You Should Know: 230 Million Years for People Short on Time

4-minute read
keywords: paleontology, popular science

When it comes to popular science books, some of the books I admire most are the smallest ones. It takes great skill to capture the essence of a subject into a short book, steer clear of well-trodden ground, and contribute something novel that will educate and enthuse your reader. Palaeontologist and science communicator Dean Lomax here collects ten short essays on dinosaurs, convincingly showing that good things come in small packages.

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Book review – Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

7-minute read
keywords: fossils, paleontology, trilobites

In preparation for Andy Secher’s new book Travels with Trilobites I decided to first reach back in time to read Richard Fortey’s 1999 book Trilobite! as a warm-up exercise. Why? For no other reason than that Fortey’s autobiography A Curious Boy impressed me so much that I bought several of his earlier books and I need an excuse to read them. This, then, is the first of a two-part dive into the world of that most enigmatic extinct creature: the trilobite.

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Book review – The Princeton Field Guide to Pterosaurs

7-minute read
keywords: paleontology, pterosaurs

This is the second of a two-part dive into the world of pterosaurs, following on from my review of Mark Witton’s 2013 book Pterosaurs. Almost a decade later, the well-known independent palaeontologist and palaeoartist Gregory S. Paul has written and illustrated The Princeton Field Guide to Pterosaurs. Admittedly, a field guide to extinct creatures sounds contradictory. Really, this is an illustrated guide for the palaeo-enthusiast in which Paul’s signature skeletal reconstructions take centre stage.

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