The Dinosaurs Rediscovered, Michael J. Benton
If you have a keen interest in dinosaurs, it’s most likely this “rediscovery” will hold no surprises for you, though it’s still fun as a synthesis of recent knowledge and understanding about dinosaurs. It’s also a beautiful object, with colour reproductions of dinosaurs and our best understanding of what they looked like, and other helpful illustrations.
There’s not much to say about it, really, beyond that: it provides good explanations of how we know what we know, edges toward the speculative at times, and generally is a paean to science and the way we are beginning to be able to test hypotheses that just had to kind of stand.
(One example being, of course, that we now know what colour some dinosaurs were, due to examination of the shapes and types of cells in their remains.)
Entertaining, and possibly worth keeping around just to be a reference work on dinosaurs, but not surprising. Unless you’re about ten years behind and need an update, in which case I’m sure it serves admirably!
At some point I’ll treat myself to a dinosaur non fiction book but I’d need to find a store that I could leaf through them all and pick the perfect one!
There’s quite a few out lately, it’s true! I think The Tyrannosaur Chronicles is still my favourite for depth of details, though of course it’s tyrannosaurs only.
I haven’t paid much attention to dinosaurs since I was in grade two, so this sounds like a good read to refresh my knowledge!
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Definitely! It’s not super in depth on any one dinosaur, but it goes into a lot of the principles that we can use to tell us how dinosaurs lived, in general terms.
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