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

摘要

Serendipity lies behind this review. About three months ago, Ispent a few days at an Airbnb owned by a couple with twoteenage sons. Browsing their bookshelves, I was intrigued bythe number of books on dinosaurs. There must have been atleast a dozen, many well illustrated, ranging from non-scientif-ic kids’ books depicting herds of herbivores unsuspectinglymunching lush foliage while being stalked by voracious blood-thirsty carnivores, to much more sophisticated tomes includingencyclopedia complete with statistics and detailed reconstruc-tions of hundreds of different dinosaur species. The booksbelonged to the teenagers, and it struck me that theirs was thegeneration that grew up with dinosaurs ─ dinosaur stickers,dinosaur images on their t-shirts and pyjamas, and dinosaurfilm stars in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park(based on Michael Crichton’s 1990 book of the same name).As in the movie, it appeared that the extinct animals had liter-ally become alive for these two members of the post-millennialgeneration, many of whom apparently can name and recog-nize more than a dozen dinosaur species from a very youngage. Moreover, the cornucopia of information in the encyclo-pedia was evidence that this surge of public interest in extinctanimals was based on much new scientific research and infor-mation. Among the books was a hefty tome by Steve Brusatteentitled The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a LostWorld, with resounding endorsements from The WashingtonPost (‘a masterpiece’), The New York Times (bestseller), TheEconomist (recommended reading), The Smithsonian, TheTimes of London, Science News, Popular Mechanics, etc.(best popular science book of the year), and Scientific Ameri-can (‘the ultimate dinosaur biography’), among many others.After a short browse, I realized my education was in seriousneed of an update and I got my own copy a couple of weekslater.