They’re not that old, especially not in the total timeline of life on Earth. But the amount of information that Brusatte communicates is not that much this is still pop science writing in which concepts like niches and food chains and continental drift all need their explanations.Īnother perspective that I appreciated is that Dinosaurs are actually quite recent creatures. So, we get a fuller picture about what the Earth looked like and what the climatic zones and ecosystems were, and how the various dinosaur species emerged in which locations under which climatic circumstances. What I also appreciated was that Brusatte connects the dinosaur timeline with the geological information about the splitting up of Pangaea and with climatological information. These are fine embellishments to make an otherwise dry tale come to life. About the discovery of various sites and about the Bone Wars in the late 19th century and so on. He took material that can be very dry and made it accessible in a way that is not easy to do.īesides following the history of life and mentioning which dinosaurs appeared when in the timeline, he also tells stories about the history of palaeontology. I wanted to say that this is Dinosaurs For Dummies, but that’s too mocking. Compared to a book like Contingency and Convergence by Russell Powell, this is easy-to-follow material for the Tired Generation. Through personal, easy to read anecdotes he guides us through the evolutionary history of the dinosaurs.
This is not the kind of scientific book that decades ago would have been written in which the writer would set down the facts in an impersonal, lecturing way, but a much more informal, personal account in which writer Steve Brusatte narrates his cooperations with scientists from all over the world, from Argentina to Poland to China, in the pursuit of knowledge. The story of the dinosaurs is also the story of scientists, palaeontologists in particular, and their maverick escapades in braving heat and mosquitoes to dig around in the rocks. If you are interested in Dinosaurs but are not a scientist and generally unfamiliar with palaeontology and the history of life, then this book is a great introduction to the material. Before there was fantasy and science fiction, before there was literature, before there were learned gentlemen, before there was agriculture, before there were humans, before there were freaking capuchin monkeys, before there was grass, before there were, in some cases, flowers, there were the dinosaurs.
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