Year: 2022

Book review – From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution

8-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology

If you have read up on palaeontology, you will likely have encountered the name of Cambridge palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris. Known initially for his work on the invertebrates of the Burgess Shale, he has since also written on both astrobiology and convergent evolution, which he explored in The Runes of Evolution, his first book with Templeton Press. Always ready for some good-spirited provocation and mischief, he here dissects six supposed myths of evolution, providing a thought-provoking mix of ideas. I found as much to agree as to disagree with.

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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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Book review – Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy

8-minute read
keywords: paleontology, pterosaurs

The downside of starting a review blog is that certain books will have missed the cut, having been published sometime before you started. And with the constant churn of exciting new titles, it is hard to make time for them. Sometimes a new book on a certain topic is just the prompt you need though. Thus, with Princeton University Press having recently published Gregory S. Paul’s The Princeton Field Guide to Pterosaurs, I decided to finally take Mark Witton’s 2013 book Pterosaurs off the shelf and read them back-to-back. This, then, is the first of a two-part dive into the world of these extinct flying reptiles.

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Book review – Tears for Crocodilia: Evolution, Ecology, and the Disappearance of One of the World’s Most Ancient Animals

7-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, herpetology, zoology

Being of the large and toothy kind, crocodiles have a bit of a public relations problem. Fortunately for them, people such as biologist Zach Fitzner fight their corner. For Tears for Crocodilia, he has gone to great lengths to give the reader a well-rounded picture of crocodilians (the name for the order; its living members are divided over three families: alligators & caimans, true crocodiles, and gharials). This ambitious and wide-ranging debut draws on scientific literature to give a primer on their biology, on personal experience working in and travelling to different countries to introduce the main groups, and on interviews with scientists, zookeepers, and conservationists to include a wide range of viewpoints.

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Book review – A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species

7-minute read
keywords: conservation biology, ecology, evolutionary biology

When considering environmental issues, the usual rallying cry is that of “saving the planet”. Rarely do people acknowledge that, rather, it is us who need saving from ourselves. We have appropriated ever-larger parts of Earth for our use while trying to separate ourselves from it, ensconced in cities. But we cannot keep the forces of life at bay forever. In A Natural History of the Future, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Rob Dunn considers some of the rules and laws that underlie biology to ask what is in store for us as a species, and how we might survive without destroying the very fabric on which we depend.

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Book review – When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be

7-minute read
keywords: environmental history, geomorphology, paleoclimatology

When seeing the world through a deep-time lens, no landscape feature is permanent. The Sahara, for example, “only” came into existence some 7 million years ago. In that time, it has not always been the parched desert it is now but has been green and verdant numerous times, crisscrossed by rivers and home to hippos, turtles, fish and other animals and plants typical of wetter climes. In this book, retired earth scientist Martin Williams draws on a long lifetime of research and desert expeditions to give a very accessible introduction to the surprisingly complex geography of the Sahara, answering some very basic questions.

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Book review – An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

8-minute read
keywords: ethology, popular science, sensory biology

Imagine you are a Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist for your reporting on the pandemic for The Atlantic. What do you do in your downtime? How about cranking out a New York Times bestseller? An Immense World is a multisensory exploration of the many ways in which animals perceive their environment. Some of these senses are familiar to us, others are utterly alien, all of them reveal that the world humans perceive through their senses is only a slice of a much larger world.

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Book review – Sex in City Plants, Animals, Fungi, and More: A Guide to Reproductive Diversity

6-minute read
keywords: ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology

Where evolution is concerned, the city is a cauldron exerting its own unique mix of selection pressures on the organisms living here. The metronome beating at the heart of this process is sex. For this book, retired physician Kenneth D. Frank has explored his hometown of Philadelphia in the Eastern US state of Pennsylvania and documented the astonishing variety of sex lives playing out right under our noses. Many of these organisms can be found in cities around the world. Remarkably well-researched and richly illustrated with photos, this collection of 106 one-page vignettes shows what avocational naturalists can contribute both in terms of observations and in terms of highlighting the many basic questions that are still unanswered.

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Book review – Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender

7-minute read
keywords: ethology, primatology, sociology

Wading into current gender debates is not for the faint of heart, but that has not discouraged Dutch-born primatologist Frans de Waal from treading where others might not wish to go. In Different, he draws on his decades-long experience observing our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, to see what we can learn from them about us. As much as many people would like it to be otherwise, our ape heritage influences us strongly, also where sex and gender are concerned. Unbeholden to mainstream ideology, this nuanced book is a breath of fresh air that is sure to simultaneously delight and upset people on both sides of various gender-related discussions.

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Book review – Imbattable, Tome 3: Le Cauchemar des Malfrats

3-minute read
keywords: comics, superheroes

Long-time readers of this blog might remember that back in April 2019 (review #155 to be precise), I reviewed two French comics of a most unlikely and original superhero. Its creator, Pascal Jousselin, does not have much of a social media presence so I only recently found out that over a year ago, in April 2021, volume 3 was published. Do I want to read more mind-bending comics that play with the medium itself? What a question, allons-y!

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