The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

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THE ULTIMATE DINOSAUR BIOGRAPHY," hails Scientific American : A thrilling new history of the age of dinosaurs, from one of our finest young scientists.

Another ambivalent three stars for a book that has two strands of highly varying success in my opinion. Jingmai [O’Connor] calls herself a Paleontologista—fitting given her fashionista style of leopard-print Lycra, piercings, and tattoos, all of which are at home in the club but stand out (in a good way) among the plaid-and-beard crowd that dominates academia…she’s also the world’s number-one expert on those first birds that broke the bounds of Earth to fly above their dinosaur ancestors. They are so fascinating. Unbelievably huge reptiles that roamed the entire planet. Not only that, but it's so strange that we regard them as something of a failed species. Dinosaurs were around for 150 million years. The homo genus is only about 2.5 million years old, and homo sapiens have been around for a measly 300,000 years. Perhaps less. You think we have another 150 million years in us?A review of: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The untold story of a lost world by Steve Brusatte Robinson, P., Separating fact from fiction in a farcical story! creation.com/dino-feathers-southpole, 3 December 2019. Return to text.

The end of the Jurassic with the split of Godwana in multiple continents, leading to smaller scale climate change and greater diversity in the Cretaceous, is another example of how changes in environment induced changes in dinosaurs species, providing partly explanations for Sauropods splitting their ecosystem in niches and them dying out together with Stegosauruses' at the end of the Jurassic. Even when dealing with the dinos themselves, Brusatte's writing leaves something to be desired. He's definitely readable and competent at the sentence level, but his tone throughout the book is so breezy and so full of high-powered adjectives that at times I wondered if he wasn't sacrificing accuracy for cheap excitement. Probably the most overt example of this is when he describes a particular fossilized creature two different times as "mule-sized," only to include a photo which makes it clear the thing was hardly as big as a golden retriever. Maybe an innocent mistake, but a worrying one in a book that purports to be laying down hard scientific fact. What's more, he absolutely loves all that old-timey, imperialism-tinged language about the dinos conquering and colonizing and ruling over their domain, which reaches its zenith in the eye-rollingly effusive chapter about T. Rex ("What feast befits the King?" "Like so many monarchs, Rex was a glutton.") I know he's trying to appeal to a popular audience here, but it's still jarring to see that kind of lens applied so earnestly and uncritically in 2018. An interesting lecture (33 minutes) on how paleontologists research dinosaurian social behavior and what they have found - Social Behaviour in Dinosaurs - with David Hone Hone's delivery has a sing-song rhythm that can be a bit soporific, but the content is fascinating. Of particular interest is the basis for juvenile clustering.But there was more to it than that, because continents don’t just split up and call it a day. As with human relationships, things can get really nasty when a continent breaks up. And the dinosaurs and other animals growing up on Pangea were about to be changed forever by the aftereffects of their home being ripped in two.” The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs' is an excellent introduction to Dinosaurs for general readers. The book has lots of drawings and photographs illustrating a very high-spirited and picturesque narrative describing the evolutionary history and daily lives of dinosaurs through the three periods of Time (maybe 235 million years ago until 66 million years ago) when the original dinosaurs existed, walked about and ate each other (if they weren't the vegetarian ones). Of course, birds, which are dinosaurs in disguise (my words) in their evolved state, still exist, so, many of us, including me, basically breakfast 🐣on dinosaurs 🦖 eggs every day 😁. Life did find a way for millions of years. Brusatte writes about them in this book. He begins at the beginning literally and gives a glimpse into what their last moments might have been like. He details changes, both environmental, geographical and physiological. These prehistoric ancestors to some of our modern-day animals have intrigued man since fossils have been discovered. Many questions have been answered, while others are still out there. Theories on their demise have been around since their fossils have been discovered. Rise and Reign begins primarily within the Pennsylvanian era with stem-mammals and moves to our more modern times. One of my favorite things about this book is that as we move from large period to large period Mr. Brusatte regales us with a short narrative about something might have or might happen in the future to set the scene for what we’re about to see or have explained in the next section. He doesn’t focus in on the creature themselves, instead looking at each one in relation to what made it different and unique that added to the overall growth of the mammalian line (or bush if you want a more accurate descriptor). Around 201 Ma, the supercontinent Pangea breaks up. This sparks a 600,000-year reign of terror with megamonsoons—extreme seasonal changes in wetness and dryness—plus volcanoes spewing out lava. “In all, some three million square miles of central Pangea were drowned in lava” (p. 87), treacherous weather and extreme climates. In this mass extinction event over 30% of all species, and maybe more, died out. It was this event, killing off the competition, which Brusatte claims allowed the dinosaurs to greatly diversify in response and rise to their dominant position.