Book: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
Krishna
Some authors can take you away in their world, sweeping you off your feet by the sheer passion of their subject and so filled with wonder and so powerful in communication that their enthusiasm catches you and carries you along. This is the hallmark of a good book. In non fiction, you have The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey, ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ by Lynn Truss about language, ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson in science. This is one such book, and it reads great and is filled with passion.
The real story he narrates starts about 252 million years ago, to a time preceding dinosaurs when strange creatures roamed the earth – or at least roamed what is today China. Big salamanders, ugly pareiasaurs, fat but small dicynodonts, big (bear sized) gorgonopsians with a razor sharp set of teeth.
Volcano eruptions on a massive scale wiped out almost all life on earth – one that made the extinction at the end of Cretaceous period look like a weak imitation. Steve describes the mass extinction during this period powerfully. 90% of all species became extinct! Most of the above also died out, never to come back.
His style of narrating the story interspersed with his own experiences, rather than causing irritation, enhances the story. That is because the asides are all about how paleantologists derive from scant evidence how the animal must have looked like. He describes in simple terms, but to amazing effect, how he knows from just the footprints that Prorotodactylus had long back legs and short front paws.
He describes how suddenly he found tracks of animals that proved that four legged sprawlers had evolved into a two legged animal walking upright (no, not primates yet) which were the predecessor of dinosaurs (Prorotodactylus)
He also talks about the continents being together and how we christened it Pangea. Which means that all the oceans were connected together in one large mass called Panthalassa (I did not know this). But how he describes the weather at that time etc is fascinating – he makes it accessible in familiar terms. He talks of the first true dinosaurs – Herrerasaurus and Eorapror – and you get excited along with him to see how the world of those times evolved. Nice, brilliant and vivid descriptions of how the world would have been if you happened to land right in the middle of it.
He moves on to the catastrophe at the end of Triassic and start of Jurassic age that gave the dinosaurs the opening they needed to grow and dominate the world.
Fabulous descriptions of how the carnivorous dinosaurs took over the world at the start of Cretaceous peiod (after Jurassic) are stunningly told with the author’s passion for his subject from when he was an adolescent boy comes through very well. Nice. He puts all in the context of the splitting of pangea into what are modern countries. A surprise almost at every page as you read.
He talks about how the dinosaurs, even tyrannosaurus series that produced the most well known and most terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex at its apex were quite small right until the middle of the Cretaceous era, frightened out of their wits with the giants of those times. Suddenly, they grew smarter and then bigger till they were at the apex of the food chain. Brilliant narration, keeps your interest very much alive all the way through.
The extinction of the species is good but is brief, not because the author hurries through but because it happened in a flash naturally.
Good narration, good story, lovely feeling when you finish reading and a fresh appreciation of the paleontologists who work constantly to put together the story of the animal that has captured the imagination of people from all walks of life.
9/10
– – Krishna