![]() The great thing about having a working scientist writing the book – and before he is senior enough for his own views to ossify – is getting a sense of the new research that has confirmed feathered dinosaurs and cemented something of the development of different strands of dinosaur-birds. Birds didn’t merely evolve from dinosaurs – they are dinosaurs, in the same way that bats are mammals. ![]() That not all dinosaurs were wiped out is key to Brusatte’s understanding of the dynamics of evolution too. Brusatte also gives an evocative account of the day the asteroid (or comet) hit at the end of the Cretaceous, and the order of the cataclysms that very few dinosaurs survived. ![]() For Brusatte, this explains how the dinosaurs went from minor players in the Triassic to dominance in the Jurassic. ![]() New to me was the scale of geological upheaval at the end of the Triassic, Brusatte identifying this as a key moment in the emergence of the dinosaurs, who seem to have responded better than their crocodile-ancestor counterparts to changing geological conditions as the world’s supercontinent broke up. As such, rather than a litany of big-hitters (though there are two separate chapters on tyrannosaurs), Brusatte patiently combines discussion of geology – the shifting continents –, biodiversity, feeding patterns, and the evolution of dinosaurs themselves.Īt the macro-level, there is a great interest in extinction events. The particular pleasure here is that he is attentive to the wide view of each period – his particular specialism has been in morphological diversity, using statistics to make calculations about species variation. The unashamedly populist T-Rex gets two chapters to itself.īrusatte structures the book chronologically, moving from the late Triassic to the late Cretaceous, attempting to offer a holistic view of the conditions that shaped the dinosaurs’ development. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |