biomechanics

Book review – Taking Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing

6-minute read
keywords: biomechanics, ethology, evolution

Having just reviewed the 2015 book On the Wing, I continue my brief two-part foray into the evolution of flight with Taking Flight by writer and conductor Lev Parikian. In a book that is full of wonder and humour, he marvels at the many different strategies for flying that have evolved in primarily insects and birds. However, the somewhat muddled explanations of flight mechanics and limited attention for other groups make for a somewhat uneven book.

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Book review – On the Wing: Insects, Pterosaurs, Birds, Bats and the Evolution of Animal Flight

8-minute read
keywords: biomechanics, evolutionary biology, paleontology

Flight fascinates me for two reasons: one is pure envy at being earthbound, and the other because it is a fantastic example of convergent evolution, having evolved not once, but on four separate occasions. Last year I was sent Lev Parikian’s book Taking Flight and in finally reviewing that, I took the opportunity to also read David E. Alexander’s 2015 book On the Wing. A very accessible popular science book that tells the intriguing story of the evolution of flight, it helpfully assumes little background knowledge of either evolution or biomechanics. This, then, is the first of a two-part review of how life got airborne.

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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 – An Illustrated Guide to Dinosaur Feeding Biology

8-minute read
keywords: anatomy, biomechanics, paleontology

Having just reviewed a general illustrated introduction to dinosaur behaviour, I indicated wanting to go deeper. An Illustrated Guide to Dinosaur Feeding Biology provides in spades. This technical book gives a detailed and substantial taxon-by-taxon overview of what dinosaur skulls, jaws, and teeth reveal about what, but especially how dinosaurs ate. This is a welcome survey of an otherwise scattered literature that will be invaluable for specialists.

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Book review – Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs: Using Art and Science to Bring the Past to Life

7-minute read
keywords: art, palaeontology

Though I could not paint or draw a dinosaur if my life depended on it, I never tire of reading about palaeoart. What a treat, then, that Crowood Press revisits this subject with this book by US palaeoartist Emily Willoughby. Very much a resource for those already familiar with basic art techniques, it counsels the reader on what goes into making believable and memorable palaeoart. Featuring foremost Willoughby’s favourite subject, feathered dinosaurs, the book also doubles up as a beautiful portfolio of her artwork, showcasing her mastery of a wide range of media.

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Book review – The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History

7-minute read
keywords: environmental history

Throughout human history, wood has been our constant, if somewhat overlooked companion. With The Wood Age, professor of biological sciences Roland Ennos delivers an eye-opening piece of environmental history. Reaching beyond the boundaries of this discipline, it gives the reader a comprehensive picture of how we have shaped wood and how, in turn, wood has shaped us.

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Book review – The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past

6-minute read

In the field of palaeoanthropology, one name keeps turning up: the Leakey dynasty. Since Louis Leakey’s first excavations in 1926, three generations of this family have been involved in anthropological research in East Africa. In this captivating memoir, Meave, a second-generation Leakey, reflects on a lifetime of fieldwork and research and provides an inspirational blueprint for what women can achieve in science.

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Book review – How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movement and the Robots of the Future

Animals move in many different ways – hopping, gliding, flying, slithering, walking, swimming, etc. their way through our world. Studying how they do this brings together biologists, engineers, and physicists in disciplines such as biomechanics, bioengineering and robotics. Author David L. Hu, for example, is a professor of mechanical engineering and biology. How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls is a light and amusing romp through the many remarkable forms of animal locomotion, and the equally remarkable experiments that are informing the robots of the future, although it leaves out some notable examples.

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Book review – Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone

From Skeletor to the Danse Macabre, from Army of Darkness to ossuaries and holy relics – despite being largely hidden in life, skeletons are some of the most recognizable structures that nature has produced. Science writer Brian Switek has written a sizzling little book with Skeleton Keys* that delves into both the biological and cultural significance of human bones, showing them to be more than just a powerful reminder of death and mortality.

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Book review – The Dinosaurs Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting History

If you are interested in dinosaurs, the last two years have seen a slew of great books published, and there is more in the pipeline. The latest I am reviewing here is The Dinosaurs Rediscovered from the well-known British Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology Michael J. Benton. With a huge number of possible topics you could write about, and an already saturated book market, Benton has set himself a very specific aim: to show how the science of palaeobiology has moved from a descriptive, speculative scientific discipline, to a hard, testable, rigorous one. In other words, given that palaeontologists nowadays regularly make some pretty amazing and precise claims about creatures long extinct, how, exactly, do they know that?

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