The Read: Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World
Friday's Child is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
Dinosaurs. I’m still interested in them, all these years later.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. It’s pretty straightforward.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
This is pretty much a read-it-and-done book.
Quotes
“It was a chaotic, unpredictable, unstable part of Pangea. Some animals could deal with that better than others. Dinosaurs seem to have been able to cope a little bit, but not able to truly thrive. The smaller meat-eating theropods were able to manage, but the larger, fast-growing plant eaters, which required a steadier diet, could not. Even some 20 million years after they had originated, even after they had taken over the large-herbivore niche in humid ecosystems and started to colonize the hotter tropics, dinosaurs were still having trouble with the weather.”
“T. rex was a special dinosaur in many ways, but one thing it could not do was move very fast.”
“The early development of flight appears to have been chaotic. There was no orderly progression, no long evolutionary march in which one subgroup of dinosaurs was refined into ever better aeronauts. Instead, evolution had produced a general type of dinosaur—small, feathered, winged, fast-growing, efficient-breathing—that had all the attributes needed to start playing around in the air.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The book caught me up on some of the newer findings and debates in paleontological research focused on the period between the Permian and the end of the Cretaceous. Though I didn’t think it was as good on the ‘debates’ end of things (more on that in a moment). The major take-aways for me were:
Dinosaurs classified as such were not a particularly dominant part of global ecosystems until the heart of the Jurassic: prior to that, pseudosuchians (ancestors of modern crocodiles) and non-dinosaur dinosaurmorphian animals dominated Triassic ecosystems, particularly in the drier interior of Pangaea.
The most important attribute of many of the classic Jurassic dinosaur species that in particular supported their gigantism was their complex respiratory system, a version of which is found in contemporary bird species. (I also found out that the proposition that the Jurassic-Cretaceous atmosphere was high in oxygen is wrong: I’m not sure how that factoid got lodged in my head, but I was happy to kick it out.)
I learned a lot about carnivorous dinosaurs (Brusatte’s research speciality), including a great chapter updating everything known about tyrannosaurs, including Rex (spoiler alert: Jurassic Park is wrong in every way in its depiction of Rex). I also appreciated the explanation of sauropod evolution and why it was possible for so many sauropod species to exist at the same time within mid-Jurassic ecosystems (basically they were eating different parts of various plants).
The analysis of late Cretaceous differences in dinosaur evolution was great and basically new to me—I particularly hadn’t read before about the peculiarities of dinosaur evolution in Europe at the time (which was mostly a series of large islands). I also found the material on the Triassic really interesting in general.
There’s some moderately good material in the book on new research methodologies besides fossil hunting and analysis (statistical analysis, computer modelling, building physical models of some dinosaur features, etc.), though I thought there could have been even more attention to this kind of work. (Brusatte is on the branch of dinosaur-focused paleontologists whose major research activity is collecting and analyzing fossils, so that’s part of why he remains most interested in that kind of work—plus it’s so much a part of public understanding of dinosaurs.)
On the other hand, the book sometimes frustrated me, to wit:
I’d love to read a book that isn’t so dinosaur-centric, honestly, that tries to give me as complete a picture of a past ecosystem as possible, even for that period from the mid-Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous when dinosaurs had radiated into every environment and into most ecological niches. Like most other books in this genre of science writing, this one often feels fragmentary: attention to a species here, name-dropping some others there, explanations of a species’ morphology or ecology sometimes and sometimes not. Something like “A Day in the Life of the Early Carnian Triassic”: walk me through everything in a temperate Pangaean environment. What plants are there? How big are they? What’s the seasonal climate like? What’s the physical landscape look like? What’s the rough distribution of various species? What kinds of food webs are there? Where do various organisms live? Do they burrow or swim or climb tall plants or build nests? Do we have any sense at all of what the situation of microrganisms in that era was, including pathogens? Were all the basic kinds of relationships between living organisms that we’re familiar with present in this era (e.g., were there symbiotic species? Was there parasitism? etc.) Don’t just tell me about the charismatic or well-known fossils. Are there organisms we’re sure are around but that are too soft-bodied to have left fossils for the most part? And so on.
I’d also love to read a book on a particular paleontological period that really explains and explores major contemporary debates between specialists. Brusatte mostly breezes by these and I just desperately wanted him to pause and dig in and tell me more: what was going on in the late Triassic? How exactly did anything survive the end-Triassic mass extinction event? Why were early dinosaurs so adverse to hot, arid environments? I dislike science writing that “cleans up” the science such that everything seems to march on towards neat, finished conclusions that are upheld by strong consensus. Brusatte does review enough of the work of the last fifty years to demonstrate just how much has been wrong about various previous consensus views—some of them based on reasonably contemporary scientific study. So give me a picture of the last ten years: where’s the action?
On the other hand, I got really weary really quickly of Brusatte’s sometimes lengthy physical descriptions of fellow researchers, almost all of them men, many of them inflected with strong elements of machismo connected to their fossil-hunting work. I understand the point of this kind of highly complimentary description of colleagues in this kind of book. Science is a collaborative enterprise, and moreover, scientific acquisition of fossils is now a politically and financially delicate enterprise that requires the active cooperation of governments and is rivalrous with profit-seeking private interests (as well as often taking place in highly insecure environments where national governments cannot protect researchers). No researcher in this field should write as if they are a solitary genius, and any book of this kind is an opportunity to shore up the relationships that make further research possible. Being a public figure in a field that is this prominent in popular culture requires some degree of showmanship, but I suspect that people in the field are also heartily sick of some of the outsize egos that have dominated in the past. All that said, I really did not need to hear about who looks the most like Jesus or who is the most awesomely manly adventurer and so on. There is a lot of this kind of stuff in the book. That is a different kind of template in science writing, often followed by journalists and non-fiction writers who are not themselves researchers in a field, where they are profiling prominent researchers and giving an account of their work, often in the words of the researchers themselves. Brusatte certainly needs to give credit where credit is due, but he’s not a good enough storyteller when he sets out to recount various field expeditions or conference discussions. Partly because he’s so set on complimenting other male researchers: the stories have no complexity or dimension to them. Nobody makes mistakes or is an asshole or has arguments or has to deal with difficult local conditions, for the most part—there’s a few stories that have some richer sense of a place and a narrative. The exception is anything that is far enough in the past that Brusatte can be a bit more rounded in his descriptions, but I don’t really need to read any more about Cope and Marsh. (I did appreciate his careful but honest depiction of Bakker and Ostrom’s ill-matched temperaments. Brusatte also completely trashes Horner’s depiction of T. rex as a scavenger without mentioning Horner while he’s doing it.)
(Another wishlist book I want someone to write: a book on ordinary extinctions. Meaning, at this scale of evolutionary story, there's the occasional species or group of species that just dwindles and disappears while everything else is doing just fine. I have never really seen any popular science writing that really digs into that kind of extinction, whether to lay out the variety of cases or to theorize about extinction as a basic part of evolution. Most of the popular work on this theme concentrates on extinction events, whether it's the really big ones or some smaller-scale catastrophes or abrupt shifts in regional environmental conditions.)