jaws

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 – The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins

7-minute read

The history of human evolution has become firmly wedded to the Out of Africa hypothesis: the idea that we evolved in Africa and from there spread around the world. Back in 2015, palaeoanthropologist David R. Begun gave the proverbial tree of life a firm shake with The Real Planet of the Apes, making the case that the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Providing an incredibly well-written overview of the deep evolutionary history of great apes and humans, an interesting picture emerges of species moving into and out of Africa over time. Some reviewers hailed it as provocative—but is it really?

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Book review – I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals

The seed of this book, if you will forgive me the pun, lay in an unfortunate collision between a football and the author’s scrotum. This led former neurobiologist Liam Drew to write a piece for Slate about the mammalian testicles and their precarious positioning in the males of this group. Before long, with the birth of his first daughter, he started wondering about lactation and all the other features and oddities that make us mammals. The resulting I, Mammal is a witty, irreverent overview of mammalian biology and evolution that is sure to entertain.

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