Mira que me apetecía un repaso a la paleontología del Mesozoico, pero qué desastre. Empieza con la catástrofe al pasar del Pérmico al Triásico y cómo no, termina con el meteorito, pero el autor se ve obligado a llenarlo todo de anécdotas personales de nulo interés (a quién le importan la ropa o gustos musicales de un paleontólogo polaco o chino) y sobre todo la traducción es terrible, atroz, vil, un horror.
Review of 'The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
It's a great and through look at dinosaurs, their times, specific species (particularly T-Rex), how they came to be and how they went way - great stuff! :)
Review of 'Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Your enjoyment of the book will depend on your ability to ignore/tolerate personal anecdotes. There are a few of them, but there is also plenty more dinosaur material, which is what I'm actually reading it for, although I don't mind the occasional anecdote either. I had wanted to know a bit more about early dinosaurs and the climates they lived in on the supercontinent, and it provided that information nicely. I found the information that dinosaurs didn't conquer most of Pangaea first and didn't thrive in the early deserts there extremely interesting. (Caveat: I already knew part of that, just not the desert part.)
There was another thing that struck me as odd, the claim that tyrannosaurs were very intelligent, maybe even comparable to apes. Considering troodon is normally talked up as the smartest dinosaur and yet most say it was only as smart as an emu, this seems like …
Your enjoyment of the book will depend on your ability to ignore/tolerate personal anecdotes. There are a few of them, but there is also plenty more dinosaur material, which is what I'm actually reading it for, although I don't mind the occasional anecdote either. I had wanted to know a bit more about early dinosaurs and the climates they lived in on the supercontinent, and it provided that information nicely. I found the information that dinosaurs didn't conquer most of Pangaea first and didn't thrive in the early deserts there extremely interesting. (Caveat: I already knew part of that, just not the desert part.)
There was another thing that struck me as odd, the claim that tyrannosaurs were very intelligent, maybe even comparable to apes. Considering troodon is normally talked up as the smartest dinosaur and yet most say it was only as smart as an emu, this seems like it needs a lot to back it up. Color me skeptical without further evidence, at least. Brain to body ratio isn't actually the most reliable relation for intelligence either, although it is an indicator. You expect large animals to have larger brains and one can't assume this relationship will be totally linear either (strength to body ratio definitely isn't, for instance, which is why an ant that can lift 10 times its weight wouldn't necessarily be superhuman scaled up to human sizes), which could give misleading brain to body ratios.
I'd like to add one thing: the author offers no hypothesis for why the dinosaurs rather than other dinosauromorphs or dinosaur-style crocodilians thrived. However, dinosaurs were closely related to pterosaurs which have been discovered to have primitive 'hairs'/proto-feathering, which makes it more likely this was ancestral to the group but not to crocodilians (assuming they are indeed closer to pterosaurs than crocodiles). The ability to better regulate temperature would have made a significant difference to survival when temperatures became more extreme at the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic extinction juncture. True, sauropods don't seem to have any feathering, but they may have just lost them: animals of that size certainly don't need to trap extra heat, and they don't have wings to use as fans to cool themselves off with them either.
Review of 'Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
When he’s not giving paragraph long compliments about his collogues, the author can have a knack for getting the average layman interested in the topic
