Review by New York Times Review
IF THE IDEA that Morocco once butted up against New York strikes you as just hohum; if your mind doesn't boggle that 10,000 species of dinosaurs still exist; and if you're not impressed that Tyrannosaurus rex was strong enough to bite through a car - then this book is not for you. But if John McPhee's love affair with rocks in "Annals of the Former World" floats your boat, and so does Janna Levin's entertaining narrative in "Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space," you're going to love "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs," by the paleontologist Steve Brusatte. Brusatte skillfully brings dead dino bones to life as he shares - no, gushes about - his personal journey as a young fossil hunter and the people he's met along the way. It's an "I can't wait to tell you, listen to this!" page turner, dropping one aha moment after another. "Somewhere around the world," he writes, "a new species of dinosaur is currently being found, on average, once a week. Let that sink in: a new dinosaur every... single... week." Poof. Mind blown. You think he enjoys what he does? The geek in me loves the tsunami of fine details flooding the page, written in the breezy style of a rising star millennial scientist. Brusatte systematically takes us through the various stages of dinosaur evolution, starting with the pre-dino Triassic Period, when a mass extinction cleared the path for their rise. Dinosaurs could not have flourished without these dramatic events that reshaped the earth just over 250 million years ago - lava spewing from countless erupting volcanoes, smothering life wherever it flowed, greenhouse gases blanketing the planet, heating the ancient ocean and triggering a sweltering global warming that helped wipe out most living land animals. Yet the head-scratcher remains: Why did early dinosaurs survive the hell of the Triassic extinction, leaving them - free of competitors - to multiply and dominate? "I wish I had a good answer," Brusatte confesses. "It's a mystery that quite literally has kept me up at night.... Maybe dinosaurs were just lucky." The author can't be blamed for devoting a whole chapter to the king of the dinosaurs: T. Rex. The perfect "killing machine" has been a fan favorite in movies dating back to the classic "King Kong," after all, achieving its greatest role in Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" - the film that changed the author's life. "So many scientists are impulsively drawn to the majesty that is the King, the way so many people are obsessed with movie stars and athletes," Brusatte writes. He offers plenty of meat about Rex to chew on, especially the way it chewed: its bite terrifyingly unique among all dino carnivores. "Rex bit deeply into its victim, often right through the bones, and then ripped back." As befitting a king, T. Rex's technique has been given its own name: "puncture-pull feeding." Yet missing from most movies is the evolving picture of Rex as an ancestor of birds, with feathers sticking out between its scales to keep it warm, and perhaps doubling as a mating display. And Rex was no dummy. Measurements of the brain cavity show "Rex was roughly as smart as a chimp and more intelligent than dogs and cats." And while dinosaurs did roam the entire length of the planet, North America was Rex's sole domain. Its teeth lie buried all over the continent. The often discussed dino demise 66 million years ago obscures their 150-millionyear reign, making them among the most successful creatures ever to walk the planet. "Far from being failures," Brusatte writes, "they were evolutionary success stories." Their fossilized remains can be found just about everywhere on earth. And while we talk about the fall of the dinosaurs, tens of thousands of species of dinosaurs are still among us. We call them birds. You may not believe it, the author says, but "birds are just a weird group of dinosaurs" that evolved wings and learned to fly. "The realization that birds are dinosaurs is probably the single most important fact ever discovered by dinosaur paleontologists." Young scientists like Brusatte and his buddies share a palpable sense of wonder. "I get the creeps when looking at the earliest Triassic tracks. I can sense the long-distant specter of death." This emotional connection, and Brusatte's collection of personal stories and characters, make his book special. There's the tale of Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch, "bursting with dinosaur bones," becoming a mecca for young paleontologists who flocked there after her death. Chances are, says Brusatte, "if you go see a big dinosaur exhibit today you'll see a Ghost Ranch Coelophysis," the "quintessential Triassic dinosaur." We also meet Baron Fronz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, the flamboyant "tragic genius" spy whose World War I fossil-hunting adventures in Transylvania would end in the murder-suicide of him and his lover. "Dracula," Brusatte writes, "has nothing on the Dinosaur Baron." And there's the incomparable Barnum Brown, who in 1902 would discover the first T. Rex and go on to become "the first celebrity paleontologist" - if alive today he "would be the star of some outrageous reality show. And probably a politician." Paleontology has plenty of personalities, and Brusatte pulls no punches describing their political and racial baggage. You'll get to know Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the prestigious American Museum of Natural History, who, because of his views on white supremacy, immigration and eugenics, is "often dismissed today as a bygone bigot." Osborn, Brusatte notes, was "probably not the type of guy I'd want to have a beer with." But his science was spot on. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, Brusatte is always at the right place at the right time. At Hell Creek, Mont., for the discovery of a "Triceratops graveyard," startling evidence that Triceratops was a pack species. Hanging with his mentor Mark Noreli in his fabled Central Park office at the American Museum. In China, drooling over the collection of feather-covered fossils curated by the "world's greatest dinosaur hunter," China's Xu Xing, just a stone's throw from the "paleontologista" Jingmai O'Connor and her "leopard print Lycra, piercings and tattoos." We marvel at the talented biologist Jacob Vinther, whose microscope found the color in dinosaur feathers that allowed them - like peacocks - to become better at flirting. (Only by accident, typical of evolution, did they learn to fly.) As an awe-struck fanboy Brusatte makes a pilgrimage to Italy to watch the iconic Walter Alvarez show off his historic discovery: a thin layer of clay in an obscure gorge, the long-sought remains of a disintegrated asteroid, and the first solid evidence for the idea that a cataclysmic impact wiped out the dinosaurs. The physicist Richard Feynman marveled at how nature's beauty is hidden in her details. He could find extra enjoyment in the beauty of a flower because he also understood the inner workings of the plant. The beauty of this book lies in the details, too, and in the stories of the scientists who dig them up. 'Rex was roughly as smart as a chimp and more intelligent them dogs and cats.' IRA flatow is the executive producer and host of public radio's "Science Friday."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Every week, a new species of dinosaur is being discovered somewhere in the world. Every week. We are in a new golden age of dinosaur science, and Brusatte, author of a textbook, Dinosaur Paleobiology (2012), and resident expert for the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs, provides an insider's view of the history of both dinosaurs and dinosaur science. With both dino-geek glee and science-writer exactitude, Brusatte travels the world as he tells the story of the rise of dinosaurs, from their origin in the Triassic to their eventual near extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. We follow researchers as they study dinosaur tracks, use computer models to determine body sizes and weights, trace the growth of T. rex by measuring skulls, map dinosaur genealogies as the continents drift, and see the evidence that the strike of a giant comet or asteroid spelled the end of their reign. A fascinating chapter points out that dinosaurs are not extinct, as one lineage did survive the chaos at the end of the Cretaceous: we call them birds. Superbly illustrated with photos and art, this is popular-science writing at its best.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
As Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, ably demonstrates, dinosaurs are not just for kids. His captivating text explores the excitement associated with searching for and discovering new dinosaur species, provides clues to many long-standing questions associated with dinosaurs, and furthers the understanding of ecological and evolutionary principles. This volume is a mix of memoir, chronicling Brusatte's personal odyssey from a child smitten by dinosaurs to a member of a vibrant scholarly community, and first-rate science writing for the general public. Brusatte does a superb job of relating current research, both his own and that of many colleagues around the globe. His explanations of how sauropods became so large, the reasons for the dominance of Tyrannosaurus rex, the evolution of flying ability in some dinosaurs, and the factors leading to the demise of most of these creatures are carefully crafted and presented. Brusatte is not shy about saying what is not yet known, while making it clear that this is a truly exciting period, in which new fossils are being uncovered at a dizzying pace. B&w illus. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
To any dinosaur enthusiast, paleontologist Brusatte (geosciences, Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland; Dinosaurs) has a dream job: he travels all over the world to dig for and study dinosaur fossils, serves as resident paleontologist for the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs miniseries and writes popular books on the subject. Here he traces how meek, little protodinosaurs evolved into the supercarnivores and colossal plant-eaters of the Mesozoic world, all the while adapting to drifting continents, shifting sea levels, and fluctuating climate. He then fills in the big evolutionary picture with details that bring the dinosaur species to life-what they looked like, how they lived, breathed, grew, and moved-and concludes with an explanation of why he unhesitatingly believes that dinosaurs went out at the top of their game, victims of a catastrophic asteroid. As Brusatte tells the dinosaurs' story, he also tells his own: how he turned a boyhood obsession with dinosaurs into an exhilarating scientific career. VERDICT While dinosaur books may not be a hard sell, one by a top paleontologist and lively writer should not be missed. Highly recommended for the dinosaur obsessed and anyone even mildly curious about the evolutionary importance of these iconic creatures.-Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A nimble introduction to the world of dinosaurs, those supposed "dead ends in the history of life."We are living in a golden age of paleontology, especially as it relates to the proto-reptilian and proto-avian critters of a few hundred million years past. As Brusatte (Paleontology/Univ. of Edinburgh) notes, researchers are finding an average of a new dinosaur species every week, vastly expanding not just our inventory, but also our understanding of the evolutionary history of the dinosaurs. Americans may be delighted to learn that North America is "the single richest dinosaur ecosystem known to scientists during the entire Age of Dinosaurs anywhere in the world," essential in understanding how the dinosaurs fit into their environments and existed alongside each other and other creatures. Granted, this North American trove began to form at a time when all the present continents were more or less together in the "supercontinent" of Gondwana; even so, Brusatte sorts out old mysteries of distribution such as why South America is so comparatively light in dinosaur fossil evidence. The author writes lyrically of the reptilian life of the era, which featured "plesiosaurs with long noodle-shaped necks, pliosaurs with enormous heads and paddlelike flippers, streamlined and finned creatures called ichthyosaurs that looked like reptilian versions of dolphins," and so on--none of which, he adds, are quite dinosaurs in the technical sense, a distinction that, among many others, allows Brusatte plenty of room for paleontological geekiness. The author closes with an account of why the age of the dinosaurs came to an end, following a conjectural path that was once considered radical but is now mainstream. He notes that the ecological catastrophe that it entailed, once it healed "a mere five hundred thousand years after the most destructive day in the history of Earth," opened the door onto our own mammalian world.A must-have for fans of ancient reptiles and their lost world.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
