taxonomy

Book review – The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (Third Edition)

10-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, paleontology

If you have ever seen a diagram of a dinosaur skeleton in a book or scientific paper—white bones, black silhouette, I am looking at you—odds are that it was drawn by independent palaeontologist and palaeoartist Gregory S. Paul, or at the very least inspired by his work. As a consultant and illustrator-for-hire, he has been researching and drawing these diagrams for over 40 years, and The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs brings together the largest such collection in print. I have previously reviewed his companion volumes on pterosaurs and extinct marine reptiles, which is coming at it somewhat the wrong way around. His tenure with Princeton University Press started back in 2010 with the first edition of this dinosaur guide, followed by the second edition in 2016, and the third edition in May 2024. High time, thus, to make up for that lack of review coverage. In the process, I will address the question of whether buyers of the second edition should upgrade.

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Book review – Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order

8-minute read
keywords: history of science, taxonomy

As a bonus to conclude my (now) four-part review series on the history of taxonomy, I am looking back to Susannah Gibson’s 2015 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? After dealing with biographies of Linnaeus and Buffon, and then Ragan’s Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains, her book was just crying out to be read next. Given that those three were all published in 2023 and 2024, I will leave a comparison for the end of this review and first judge this book on its merits. As it turns out, this is an easy and intriguing read that I ignored for far too long.

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Book review – Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains: The History of High-Level Biological Classification

10-minute read
keywords: history of science, taxonomy

This is the third of a three four-part series on the history of taxonomy. In the last two reviews, I zoomed in on two important historical figures, Linnaeus and Buffon. Obviously, trying to understand how the living world is organized occupied the minds of many more people, and also has a far deeper pedigree than the 18th century. How deep? How about we take stock of the last 26 centuries. Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains by molecular biologist Mark A. Ragan is an encyclopaedic behemoth that charts the history of our thinking about high-level biological classification. The phrase “animal, vegetable, mineral” might ring a bell, but that division was never universal and there was always a shifting borderland around this, to say nothing of how modern developments have upended our understanding. If that sounds even remotely interesting, buckle up: engaging with this book will be a significant if worthwhile investment. Ragan combines a deeply researched history that draws on primary literature and authoritative translations with a tightly focused and well-structured text. The result is a scholarly monograph that is remarkably engaging. Its massive scope makes it one of those once-in-a-generation books that will be indispensable for science historians and academic libraries.

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Year list – The Inquisitive Biologist’s top 5 reads of 2024

4-minute read

2024 was a year in which I managed to read and review 38 books. What follows is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful, and most thought-provoking books I read this year.

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Book review – Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

10-minute read
keywords: history of science, taxonomy

This is the second of a three-part review on the history of taxonomy. Having just read Gunnar Broberg’s biography of Linnaeus, I now turn to Every Living Thing. Linnaeus was not the only seventeenth-century scholar trying to get to grips with life’s diversity; French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (Buffon hereafter) was another. Though the two men never met, their ideas did. Author Jason Roberts provides a biography of Linnaeus and Buffon, writing an epic history of their work and intellectual legacy. It has quickly become one of my favourite books this year for introducing me to a new scientific hero.

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Book review – The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus

11-minute read
keywords: biography, history of science, taxonomy

Sometimes, topics forcefully suggest themselves to me for review. With the publication in 2023 of Mark Ragan’s Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains and then, earlier this year, Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, the history of taxonomy put itself on my to-do list. What better book to start this three-part review with than a biography of the legend himself? Though Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) is best remembered for the system of binomial nomenclature that we still use today to name species, that is only obvious with the benefit of hindsight. Linnaeus did not start his career with this goal in mind and the task for historian Gunnar Broberg is to show us how and why he got there. As this scholarly biography reveals, behind the reputation of Linnaeus as the father of biological taxonomy hides a remarkable polymath.

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Book review – A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils

6-minute read
keywords: paleontology

Giving an overview of all of dino-dom in just 50 fossils and a mere 160 pages might seem like a tall order. Fortunately, palaeontologist Paul M. Barrett, a Merit Researcher in the Earth Science Department of the London Natural History Museum (NHM), is no stranger to writing popular works on dinosaurs. This handsomely illustrated hardback will do well in the museum’s gift shop.

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Book review – The Trilobite Collector’s Guide

7-minute read
keywords: fossils, paleontology, trilobites

Following on from this 2022 book Travels with Trilobites, fossil collector and trilobite enthusiast Andy Secher returns with The Trilobite Collector’s Guide. Leaning fully into his background as a long-time editor of hard rock magazine Hit Parader, he here presents 52 chapters with top 10 lists that present a medley of trilobite facts and factoids. As before, this book is chock-a-block with many previously unseen colour photos of these fossilised arthropods, showcasing their tremendous morphological variation. In the spirit of this book, here are my top 10 observations on The Trilobite Collector’s Guide.

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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 – Cave Biodiversity: Speciation and Diversity of Subterranean Fauna

8-minute read
keywords: biodiversity, ecology, evolutionary biology

The deep sea is often mentioned as one of the last remaining unexplored areas on the planet, but there is another, closely related world: the subterranean realm of caves. Edited by cave ecologist J. Judson Wynne, Cave Biodiversity brings together fifteen experts in biospeleology to discuss several notable invertebrate and vertebrate groups. A scholarly yet readable overview, this is a welcome addition to the small number of books on this topic.

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