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A review by phileasfogg
The Tyrannosaur Chronicles by David Hone
4.0
When I was a kid, I was very into dinosaurs. I've kept up with them in the media, in a very shallow way. I'd heard that birds were descended from them, and that they probably weren't cold-blooded, as the books of my childhood claimed. I'd heard that some had feathers. But for a long time I've wanted to find a book that would bring me thoroughly up to date.
But modern dinosaur books seem to fall into two categories: picture books for children, and highly technical books for scientists.
I expect that I represent a fairly large market of adult non-scientists who would like to refresh their dinosaur knowledge, in what seems to be a golden age of paleontology.
So I bought this the moment I saw it, and it fulfilled that goal to an extent.
I have been out of touch.
Clades and cladistics now take precedence over the groupings that predominated in the literature in my youth. (The book didn't really explain what clades were--as with many of the technical terms, it assumed, I think, that I'd look it up in Wikipedia, which I did.)
Most spectacularly, birds are not just descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. So when paleontologists write scientific papers about what we used to call 'dinosaurs' (i.e. the terrible lizards who lived from about 240 to 66 million years ago), they now refer to them as 'non-avian dinosaurs'. Birds are 'avian dinosaurs'. Dinosaurs never became extinct. They are alive and extremely plentiful today.
And yet I think that if I started referring to birds as dinosaurs in real life I might be involuntarily committed.
This is an enjoyable and thorough account of what paleontologists know and suspect about tyrannosaurs, the dinosaur clade that includes the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. There are about 30 species of tyrannosaur, half of which were discovered this century. These are among the most studied dinosaurs, but there is still a lot to learn.
I needed help from Wikipedia to fully understand what I was reading. This is not necessarily a criticism. There are limits to what can be explained in a book about a scientific subject, and the existence of Wikipedia and other online resources means authors don't have to keep explaining the basics in every book about a subject.
I would have liked a lot more illustrations though, especially in the earlier chapters about anatomy, in which the anatomical terminology came thick and fast enough that I couldn't feasibly google every unknown term, and didn't care enough to try. These chapters were interesting not so much for the anatomical detail itself, as for giving a taste of the depth of paleontologists' understanding of dinosaur anatomy.
The book would have benefited much from a technical proofreader. (Is there such a profession? I suppose it's just part of the job description of a technical writer.)
Technical terms are often misspelled. This is a problem in a field where there are such things as a tyrannosaurid and a tyrannosauroid. And once you've caught the book misspelling 'proceratosaurid' as 'proceratsaurid' three times, you're never quite sure if that tyrannosaurid was supposed to be a tyrannosauroid or vice versa. Or indeed if a proceratsaurid might actually be a thing (it isn't). 'Theropod' is misspelled 'therapod' perhaps twenty times.
There were also a few cases of 'I do not think this word means what you think it means', such as when 'benefiting' is plainly supposed to mean 'befitting'. A spellchecker won't find an error like that. Comma splices became fairly common towards the end.
I enjoyed the book enough that I don't like to harp on the negative, but this is the second science book by a scientist I've read this year, and the second that's had these issues.
But modern dinosaur books seem to fall into two categories: picture books for children, and highly technical books for scientists.
I expect that I represent a fairly large market of adult non-scientists who would like to refresh their dinosaur knowledge, in what seems to be a golden age of paleontology.
So I bought this the moment I saw it, and it fulfilled that goal to an extent.
I have been out of touch.
Clades and cladistics now take precedence over the groupings that predominated in the literature in my youth. (The book didn't really explain what clades were--as with many of the technical terms, it assumed, I think, that I'd look it up in Wikipedia, which I did.)
Most spectacularly, birds are not just descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. So when paleontologists write scientific papers about what we used to call 'dinosaurs' (i.e. the terrible lizards who lived from about 240 to 66 million years ago), they now refer to them as 'non-avian dinosaurs'. Birds are 'avian dinosaurs'. Dinosaurs never became extinct. They are alive and extremely plentiful today.
And yet I think that if I started referring to birds as dinosaurs in real life I might be involuntarily committed.
This is an enjoyable and thorough account of what paleontologists know and suspect about tyrannosaurs, the dinosaur clade that includes the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. There are about 30 species of tyrannosaur, half of which were discovered this century. These are among the most studied dinosaurs, but there is still a lot to learn.
I needed help from Wikipedia to fully understand what I was reading. This is not necessarily a criticism. There are limits to what can be explained in a book about a scientific subject, and the existence of Wikipedia and other online resources means authors don't have to keep explaining the basics in every book about a subject.
I would have liked a lot more illustrations though, especially in the earlier chapters about anatomy, in which the anatomical terminology came thick and fast enough that I couldn't feasibly google every unknown term, and didn't care enough to try. These chapters were interesting not so much for the anatomical detail itself, as for giving a taste of the depth of paleontologists' understanding of dinosaur anatomy.
The book would have benefited much from a technical proofreader. (Is there such a profession? I suppose it's just part of the job description of a technical writer.)
Technical terms are often misspelled. This is a problem in a field where there are such things as a tyrannosaurid and a tyrannosauroid. And once you've caught the book misspelling 'proceratosaurid' as 'proceratsaurid' three times, you're never quite sure if that tyrannosaurid was supposed to be a tyrannosauroid or vice versa. Or indeed if a proceratsaurid might actually be a thing (it isn't). 'Theropod' is misspelled 'therapod' perhaps twenty times.
There were also a few cases of 'I do not think this word means what you think it means', such as when 'benefiting' is plainly supposed to mean 'befitting'. A spellchecker won't find an error like that. Comma splices became fairly common towards the end.
I enjoyed the book enough that I don't like to harp on the negative, but this is the second science book by a scientist I've read this year, and the second that's had these issues.