The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life
This popularised science book is based on the Walking With… series (Walking With Dinosaurs, Walking With Beasts, Walking With Monsters), the classic prehistory documentary tv shows, but with plenty of additional information. It is in the form of a kind of encyclopedia, each page or spread about one species that appears in the show. It is richly illustrated with plenty of pictures from the series and of great fossils.
I would strongly recommend The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life if you are curious about the whole evolution of life, or if you are really into dinosaurs but want to put them in a broader perspective that is not too detailed!
It is written by Tim Haines and Paul Chambers and was published in 2006, so it is quite up to date.
Dinosaurs – A Concise Natural History
This book was written by David. E Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel, the second edition published in 2009. It is an up to date, basic book that is perfect for interested beginners. By focusing a lot on the scientific aspect of dinosaur paleontology, but keeping it at a simple, comprehensible level, it becomes an excellent introduction to dinosaur science, and gives you a sound basis for more advanced reading. In other words, it is a step away from the children books with colourful drawings and texts all about who ate who, and toward more hard anatomy and tricky questions the paleontologists have been wrestling with.
The book begins with a section of the basics of fossil preservation, Earth’s evolutionary history and what separates dinosaurs from other animals. Next follow five chapters, each thoroughly describing one of the main dinosaur groups, including their characteristics, what we know about them, and what we still don’t quite understand. After that, there are two chapters on the origin and evolution of birds, including a clear (but excessive) set of arguments for why birds are dinosaurs. (It is excessive because it lists a vast amount of characteristics that dinosaurs and birds have in common, which indeed shows compellingly that they are very closely related; however, the only reason birds are dinosaurs is because we have changed the definition of a dinosaur to include birds – don’t be fooled: scientists did not discover that birds are dinosaurs, they made birds into dinosaurs.) The final section is where the things get truly interesting – they regard three of the greatest questions in dinosaur plaenotology: whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or not; about how they interacted with the plants around them; and how they were extinct.
The only real downside of this book is the unprovoked use of excessive idioms. Perhaps this is a way popularising the content, but, in my opinion, it is simple enough to do without weird expressions that can be impossible to understand unless you are familiar with them. Regardless, this is not a severe handicap, because the text is mostly clear, and the content beside these nuisances is excellent!
If you are curious about dinosaurs, and you want to reach for a higher level, this is an ideal book. It is not long – only about 300 pages, and they are not heavily texted – so you can learn much about dinosaurs rather quickly.
Oh, and I almost forgot: the illustrations are fantastic!
The Complete Dinosaur
This is a compilation of some forty chapters about different aspects of dinosaur science, written by various authors, edited by James O. Farlow and M. K. Brett-Surman, published in 1997 (so it is not very modern, yet not too old either). It is a heavy book, with a lot of content, and, I confess, I have not managed to read the whole book. Still, I hope that, having read most of it, I can give a good picture of the volume as a whole.
The difficulty level is a slight step up relative to Dinosaurs – A Concise Natural History (below), but the texts are still pretty much comprehensible for the average reader. There are even several chapters dedicated to explaining technical terms and scientific concepts used later, so there should not be any problems understanding it. The anatomical descriptions are a bit more detailed than the aforementioned book, and the focus on unresolved questions is roughly equal. So, if you enjoyed Dinosaurs – A Concise Natural History, I’m sure you will like The Complete Dinosaur as well. (Personally, I prefer this book, because the authors are not trying to be funny – trying and failing – as in the other.)
The second half of this volume is where things are starting to become truly interesting. Here, you can find texts on virtually any major question about dinosaur biology and evolution: diets, interactions, reproduction, growth rates, health, metabolism (inner chemistry), biomechanics, footprint study; how the different dinosaurs were spread out, what other organisms shared their world, and how they became extinct.
My impression is that the editors have worked hard to keep the level appropriate for anyone interested in dinosaurs to follow, and keep it sophisticated enough to be useful for higher education. They succeeded very well in this task; the balance is truly impressive!
Still, this book is big, and I would recommend you to get it only if you are seriously interested about dinosaurs at a deeper level. However, as literature for academic studies, or just as entertainment for those truly curious about the scientific part of dinosaurs, The Complete Dinosaur is excellent!
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The Dinosauria
This book would be yet another step up after The Complete Dinosaur, with a similar outline, but far more detailed information and a much more technical language. Unlike The Complete Dinosaur, The Dinosauria is written chiefly for other experts, and therefore makes little effort to keep the content easily comprehensible and interesting. In reward to those who make the effort of trying to read this cumbersome tome, it contains all you could need to know about a dinosaur group, and even more. It is indeed the Bible of dinosaur paleontology, and most scientific papers on the topic of dinosaurs refer to this book!
I have the second edition (published in 2004), and I recall reading somewhere that it is a major remake of the first edition from 1990. I have not read the entire book – no human being would survive that and retain his/her sanity – but I worked through a large number of the chapters gathering information for an essay. Thus, my experience of the book is not exhaustive, but, from what I know, I wish to give you a warning: do not buy, or even open the book, unless you are absolutely sure you are either insanely curious about dinosaurs, or will need the information for academic work. Another tip is to know exactly what you want/need to know, and skim the pages for that information, and nothing else – the book is very well organised, at least the meticulous anatomical descriptions, each paragraph treating one bone or bone group, so it is possible to avoid reading too much. I give you these completely serious tips because the text is extremely technical and so utterly dry and sterile that you go crazy under the strenuous effort to understand and the mental strain of trying to swallow the boredom brought by the parts you are not interested about, and, if you go on for long enough, you will want to throw the book right through a wall.
This can be illustrated by an arbitrary quote from the chapter on sauropods (p. 275):
The frontals are stout, flat elements that contact the nasals and prefrontals rostrally and the parietals and postorbitals caudally. The frontals are wider transversely than they are rostrocaudally, a eusauropod synapomorphy (Gauthier 1986). In most sauropods the frontals are paired and meet each other on the midline at an interdigitating suture. In dicraeosaurids, however, the frontals are fused (Salgado and Calvo 1992). The caudal margin of the frontal does not form part of the dorsal margin of the supratemporal fossa in neosauropods and Omeisaurus (Wilson and Sereno 1998). The frontal thins laterally, and this thinner edge forms the dorsal margin of the orbit. Ventrally the caudal part of the frontal forms a nearly vertical, laterally directed wing-like structure. This area attaches to the caudal surface of the lateral projection of the laterosphenoid and also meets the rostral face of the dorsal process of the postorbital. On the rostromedial portion of the ventral surface the frontal bears a ridge that forms the contact with the dorsal edge of the braincase (the orbitosphenoid and rostral part of the laterosphenoid). On the midline, between the rostral ends of these ridges, is a smooth area that forms the dorsal rim of the opening for the olfactory nerve (c.n. I).
Please, do not get me wrong here. The Dinosauria is incredibly useful, because it is such a vast fountain of dinosaur knowledge. But, digging out the information is comparable to one of Hercules’ labours.
As in The Complete Dinosaur, the chapters are written by various authors, experts in their respective area, and the work is edited by David B. Weishampel, Peter Dodson and Halszka Osmólska. Following a couple of introductory chapters, the first section contains highly advanced and condensed texts about the different dinosaur groups. Unlike The Complete Dinosaur, however, the subdivision is at a deeper level. For example, the theropod group is treated in nine different chapters instead of one. The group-specific texts are succeeded by chapters on the geographical distribution, ecology, physiology and extinction of the dinosaurs.
As a final word, voicing my main point about The Dinosauria, I wish to say that the book is worth its weight in gold to anyone who is serious about dinosaur paleontology, but its use comes at a great cost.
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Earth – An Introduction to Physical Geology
This is book is about general geology, not as much paleontology, but it is a truly excellent introduction for beginners (as the title suggests), and is thus essential for any serious paleontologist. It is apparently very famous, and for good reasons!
I have the international edition of the tenth edition, published in 2010, written by Edward J. Tarbuck and Frederick K. Lutgens, illustrated by Dennis Tasa. It is a heavy book with more than 700 pages, divided over 24 chapters, but it is incredibly easy to read, and full of nice pictures and clear diagrams, so it is not daunting to read at all. Moreover, each chapter is pretty much independent, since the authors realised that few would read the whole book. This makes Erath tiresomely repetitive if you do read most of it, unfortunately – or perhaps you find that the repetition is useful for studying – I guess that depends on how (if) you study.
The three introductory chapters give a brief introduction to geology as a whole, and more specific walk-throughs of plate tectonics and minerals. The next five chapters describe the three rock types – igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic – plus volcanoes after igneous rocks and weathering and erosion right before sedimentary rocks, to give a fuller understanding of these types. Following these is a chapter on different ways of determining geologic time (which I have not read, but probably should, because I have serious doubts about some methods…). The four following chapters go more into detail about how the Earth works: its interior, more about plate tectonics, and earthquakes. After that, there are six chapters on destructive surface processes and how they form various types of landscapes. The final four chapters are on more mixed topics: climate change, Earth’s evolution (!), resource and energy matters, and geology of other planets.
I would definitely recommend Earth – An Introduction to Physical Geology to… well anyone!
