fossils

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 – 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 – Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know

7-minute read
keywords: ethology, paleontology

I have written previously that deducing behaviour of extinct animals from fossils millions of years old might seem science fiction, but is very much science fact. That said, in his previous book, English palaeontologist David Hone pointed out that dinosaur behaviour is the one area where we see the greatest disconnect between what we know and what people think we know. His new book Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior is a sobering reality check for the lay reader, but I suspect that even palaeontologists might come away wondering whether there is anything we know for sure. Concise, well-structured, and beautifully illustrated by palaeoartist Gabriel Ugueto, this is a superb book that transcends “merely” being a good popular science work by also addressing professional palaeontologists.

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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 – 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 – The Story of Earth’s Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life

7-minute read
keywords: earth sciences, history of science, paleoclimatology

This is the fifth instalment in what can unofficially be dubbed the 25 Discoveries series by palaeontologist and geologist Donald R. Prothero. After four previous books on fossils, rocks, dinosaurs, and evolution—I reviewed the last three (mostly) positively—Prothero now turns to palaeoclimatology. A chronology with character, this book takes the reader through 4.5 billion years (Ga) of Earth’s changing climate and its impact on life, while explaining how we know what we know.

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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 – Infinite Life: A Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution and Life on Earth

5-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology

Jules Howard is no stranger to sex. A science writer and zoological correspondent, his gleefully amusing 2014 book Sex on Earth is particularly relevant to the topic at hand. Even there, however, eggs were just a sideshow. And therein lies the problem. Likely, the first question to be asked when eggs come up in conversation is how you like them for breakfast, or some hackneyed joke involving chickens. Focusing on the oology in zoology, Infinite Life retells the history of life, this time from the perspective of the almighty egg.

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