Dinosaurs: a field guide – Gregory S. Paul ***

This isn’t the only book with this title, indicating that the whole idea of a field guide you can take out and help in ‘spotting’ dinosaurs is rather an attractive concept, at least to publishers. I am rather doubtful in this particular case whether the book would make a good practical field guide – it is too big, coming in somewhere between a large hardback and small coffee table book in size, and there is too much introductory text.

I’d also suggest that a field guide to dinosaurs should be a book you can take out to use to spot live dinosaurs, what this book is (more practically, I admit) one that that concentrates on skeletons, and would be more appropriately described as a field guide to dinosaur skeletons.

There is no doubt that Gregory S. Paul knows his stuff, but this book falls at one of the main hurdles to producing a good popular science book – identifying who it is aimed at. Dinosaurs are incredibly popular with younger children, but the dry, detailed tone of the introductory text, which is packed with information, really wouldn’t appeal to the younger reader. Similarly, the guide pages are too detailed and slightly dusty feeling for anyone but a resting academic or older dino anorak.

The other test of how a dinosaur book is pitched is to see how it treats that favourite, the T. rex – it does get a full page picture, but the entry lacks the sort of excitement I would hope to get from such a sauric superstar. I was also slightly disappointed there was no mention – even if it were to dismiss it – off the much vaunted speculation in the last few years that T. rex was a scavenger rather than a hunter.

It is all very structured and analytical and scientific. But I’m really not sure who is going to read it, or why I would buy this rather than one of the many other dinosaur titles. Having said that, the enthusiastic reviews on Amazon suggest someone loves it – so if esoteric dino details are your thing, it’s definitely one to add to your library.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Jo Reed

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied), the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Search This Blog