Let's say you have read the delightful _My Beloved Brontosaurus_ by Brian Switek and you find yourself hankering for more facts and scientific insight. Let's say you remember being enchanted with dinosaurs as a kid and you wonder what you'd be doing now if the rest of life hadn't turned you away from that initial fascination. Let's say you just want to get the latest on what paleontologists are doing. Here's what to do: get _The Complete Dinosaur_ (Indiana University Press), edited by M. K. Brett-Surman, Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., and James O. Farlow, with Bob Walters as art consultant, and written by sixty experts in different subspecialties. The book is as fine and as imposing a volume as any I have seen from a university press. It is enormous, 1,100 big pages and over six pounds in weight. The pages have lovely wide margins often used for illustrations, and there are illustrations aplenty, not just of the amazing beasts, but of their descent trees, bone loading, tracks, bone growth rings, and much more. This is not light reading, in any sense. I could not take the book to bed for nighttime reading, nor even to my recliner. I wound up setting it on one of my weight benches and reading it from an adjacent chair. The chapters are full of detail and the prose is (at least in big chunks) necessarily technical; you will find many sentences like, "Plagued by inconsistent definitions, use, and predictions, it is not always clear whether gigantothermy postulates a convergence of metabolic rates as well as thermoregulatory performance, or whether the supposed metabolic convergence is toward the reptile level, the mammal level, or in between." (The appendices do include a big and useful glossary, as well as a list of dinosaur-related websites.) The forty-five chapters here, however, represent detailed thought, sustained over centuries (and this is the second edition of the book, the first having come out in 2007). The erudition on display, applied to ancient animals that interest everyone, is an inspiration.
The start of the book gives a history of human thought about dinosaurs, showing that fossil discoveries were made by many primitive societies and may have been the source of myths about monsters, griffins, or dragons. If you fantasize about going into the field and uncovering the next _T. rex_, there are detailed and basic instructions here. Get the permission of the landowner and respect the landscape are the first rules. "Dinosaurs are no longer trophies. Instead they are scientific specimens whose context is as important as the bones themselves." Mapping has been made much easier with GPS. There is a chapter here on specific modern technology used in the field, like handheld devices to upload notes and descriptions of finds directly into a field office, avoiding much of the confusion from the transcription of field notes (or the theft or loss of field journals). A huge amount of the book deals with just how much information we might draw out of fossils. Muscular tissue is seldom fossilized, but putting flesh on dinosaur bones is essential for understanding what they looked like and how they moved. There is even bone evidence for how nerves ran, or infections, or cancers. Bones are not the only things dinosaurs left behind. Rarely, dinosaurs left footprints, and such variables as hip height, print length, or narrowness of separation between left and right prints can be used to calculate speed. Reflecting on the booming field of investigation of what dinosaurs ate is a message that could apply to many of the other subjects of this book: "There is much here to entertain and frustrate the paleontologists of the future!"
There is so much information here in this enormous book: how different dinosaurs evolved; how they are put up as museum exhibits; their bird descendants; their reproductive biology; and much, much more. I will end with a personal note. Every medical student learns the twelve cranial nerves (along with a more or less silly or ribald mnemonic for their names). If someone had asked me about cranial nerves in other mammals, I would have expected that they'd be there, too. But it was a surprise, in the chapter on dinosaur paleoneurology, to see a cast of the inside of the casing of a _T. rex_ brain, and to find the twelve cranial nerves, all lined up in order just like our own. And in the chapter on ankylosaurs, yet another casting of the inside of a braincase shows all twelve. Dinosaurs have what one author here calls "a high coefficient of weirdness," but I was amazed to learn from these examples that maybe they are not so distant after all.
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Top reviews from other countries
- Reader-718Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2024
Amazing Reference Resource.
- Roland JanskyReviewed in France on November 17, 2018
The mother of all dinosaur books
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