Whom reviewed Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton
Anchiornis huxleyi is really cute
4 stars
Chances are that unless you're extremely young, the models of dinosaurs you see nowadays are very different from the ones you grew up with. There's a lot of us who are vaguely aware of these more modern images of dinosaurs with lots of colorful feathers, but haven't really looked into it beyond that, and this book is fantastic for catching us up on what we missed.
What makes Dinosaurs Rediscovered stand out is that it's not content to just tell you all the cool new stuff we know and leave it at that. No, this is a lot more concerned with the Hows, because our drastically different modern understanding of dinosaurs compared to the big lumbering lizards of old is a result of massive changes in the practice of paleontology and its related fields. The 20th century saw the transformation of paleontology as a matter of collectors making educated guesses …
Chances are that unless you're extremely young, the models of dinosaurs you see nowadays are very different from the ones you grew up with. There's a lot of us who are vaguely aware of these more modern images of dinosaurs with lots of colorful feathers, but haven't really looked into it beyond that, and this book is fantastic for catching us up on what we missed.
What makes Dinosaurs Rediscovered stand out is that it's not content to just tell you all the cool new stuff we know and leave it at that. No, this is a lot more concerned with the Hows, because our drastically different modern understanding of dinosaurs compared to the big lumbering lizards of old is a result of massive changes in the practice of paleontology and its related fields. The 20th century saw the transformation of paleontology as a matter of collectors making educated guesses into increasingly proper, testable science that we're only beginning to see the fruits of. While catching you up on our knowledge of the dinosaurs, you're also dragged through how the whole process of getting there in a manner that both is accessible to a lay audience and that respects your intelligence. I won't pretend that I fully understood every single complicated graph shown, but I will say that I understood most of them and never felt like the author got lost in the weeds of overly specific technical explanations.
Dinosaurs were (and are) cool and cute and fascinating, and I'd really suggest this to anyone looking to modernize their knowledge about them and take in all the fun new stuff we know and get a peek into how we actually learned it all. Even if you're not particularly interested in the dinosaurs somehow, this is worthwhile as a study on how with modern technology and a whole lot of critical thinking, we can make the intangible tangible for the sake of learning.
Sometimes I worry about reaching the limits of what we can reasonably learn in the natural sciences. There's only so many fossils down there, after all, and someday we'll have found each and every one. That's a sad thought, but here I've been reminded of just how much more we can squeeze out of what we have. Humans are so cool. We were left a bunch of stones and we've wrung buckets of blood out of em.
