Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
Steve Brusatte
Natural history, paleontology

As a wee shaver, one of my oft-reread books was All About Dinosaurs, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was a character--he may have been one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones--and his books are a mixture of derring-do, science, and personal history. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is as close as I've ever come to an adult equivalent. Like Andrews, Steve Brusatte is obviously having an enormous amount of fun.

The book is at once a good overall introduction to the natural history of dinosaurs, a charming and discursive autobiography, and an up-to-date survey of modern scientific thinking. Brusatte knows a lot of colorful characters (and he seems to like them all, which is nice). If they never quite get rescued from starvation by the last-minute arrival of their camel caravan in the Gobi Desert, there are still a lot of exotic locales and bone-finding adventures. Oh, and the information itself is really interesting.

The writing is good, too. Brusatte uses a conversational, intimate tone, reminiscent of Ed Yong (that's a good thing). He doesn't dumb anything down, but he does make everything perfectly accessible. For instance, I was particularly and professionally interested in the ways that computers, statistics, and basic machine-learning techniques, are being used now in paleontology; in this, as in general, Brusatte strikes a good balance between too much and not enough information for the general reader.

I wouldn't have minded if The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs had been 50% longer, but that's hardly a complaint. Hopefully there will be a sequel.

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For a biography of Andrews, see Dragon Hunter by Charles Gellenkamp. Though not exclusively dinosaur-related, Douglas Preston's Dinosaurs in the Attic tells the story of the American Museum of Natural History and provides a good recounting of the Bone Wars.