ichnology

Book review – Life Sculpted: Tales of the Animals, Plants, and Fungi That Drill, Break, and Scrape to Shape the Earth

8-minute read
keywords: paleontology

Though we marvel at the creative side of evolution, the destructive flip side of that coin often gets less attention. Since its first stirrings, life has been involved in a war of attrition with its environment, “breaking, scraping, drilling, or otherwise changing the solid to the not-so-solid” (p. x). Leave it to palaeontologist Anthony J. Martin to write a witty book that boils over with fascinating studies about one of the more obscure corners of biology: bioerosion.

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Book review – Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by Their Trace Fossils

6-minute read

Say “dinosaurs”, and most people imagine fossilised bones and spectacular museum displays. But body fossils are not the only remains we have with which to reconstruct dinosaur lives. Nor, and this might sound controversial, are they the most important. Or so argues palaeontologist, geologist, and ichnologist Anthony J. Martin. Ichnology is the study of animal traces, whether modern or fossilised. Most traces are ephemeral and disappear within hours or days, but occasionally some are buried and end up in the fossil record. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, and with more puns than you can shake a T. rex thigh bone at, Martin forays into the rich dinosaur trace fossil record: from footprints, burrows, and nests, to teeth marks and fossil faeces. For all the jokes, and despite having been published in 2014, he raises some really interesting points.

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Book review – Locked in Time: Animal Behavior Unearthed in 50 Extraordinary Fossils

7-minute read

Fossils can tell us what animals living in the distant past looked like. Over the centuries, palaeontologists have made incredible strides in reconstructing extinct life forms, helped along by cumulative experience, technological advances, and a steadily increasing body of rare but truly exceptionally preserved fossils. But reconstructing their behaviour—surely that is all just speculative? In Locked in Time, palaeontologist and science communicator Dean R. Lomax, with the able help of palaeoartist Bob Nicholls, presents fifty of the most exceptional fossils that preserve evidence of past behaviour: from pregnant plesiosaurs to a pterosaur pierced by a predatory fish. I was eagerly awaiting this book from the moment it was announced, but I was still caught off-guard by some of the astonishing fossil discoveries featured here.

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Book review – The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath Our Feet

An underground lair… what child didn’t daydream about it? As a child, I spent several summer holidays with friends constructing one. Granted, we didn’t really burrow, we dug a pit and put a roof back over it. Even so, if I am to believe Anthony J. Martin, I am but one in a long line of burrowing animals. With The Evolution Underground, Martin paints a surprising picture of the underrated role that burrowing has played throughout evolutionary history.

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