The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.

If it seems like there’s a surfeit of information out there on dinosaurs for readers or viewers of all ages (“Dinosaur Traiiiiiiin…”), then you might share my surprise to see the publication this year of a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, that covers similar ground. Providing an overarching history of the reign of the members of the Dinosauria clade from their rise prior to the end-Triassic extinction event, through the Jurassic era, until the Chicxulub meteor caused the K-Pg extinction event and wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs from the planet around 66 million years ago, the book works down from a high-level overview and then dives to the surface to provide more specific example. Author and paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who appears on the BBC program Walking with Dinosaurs, has managed to create a book for the mass market that doesn’t skimp on the science or on the sort of specific details that give texture and relevance to the broader story, while also drawing very specific parallels between the two extinction events that bookend the dinosaurs’ reign and the mass extinction event going on right now due to the actions of mankind.

(Full disclosure: This book was published by the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins, which also published my book, Smart Baseball, and I received a copy of the book through my relationship with them after Mr. Brusatte reached out to me via Twitter.)

Brusatte provides two main recurring features in the book while telling a fairly linear history of dinosaurs, including why they ended up the dominant species after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event (one caused by runaway global warming that was exacerbated by the release of methane trapped in glaciers and polar ice caps, which is exactly what anthropogenic climate change is threatening to do right now) and how they died off in rather quick fashion. One is that he profiles several of the best-known dinosaur species or genii, including Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, in disciplined, fact-based fashion to try to counteract many of the myths that have grown up around various sauropods through the magic of fiction. (The demon spawn of Michael Crichton come in for special criticism throughout the book.)

The other feature is a series of concrete examples from the field, as Brusatte goes to dig sites and/or talks to other paleontologists who have done so and gives detailed descriptions of how new species are found, identified, and categorized. China is the hottest spot for new dinosaur finds, and he explains why that is in geological terms, as well as why T. rex was only king of some parts of the world. Understanding what we know directly from Jurassic era fossils and what we can infer from those bones but also where and how they were found helps the reader follow the scientists’ path towards a more accurate taxonomy of sauropods and of their timeline on the planet.

Near the end of the book are two chapters that stood out as fascinating enough to live on their own as excerpts or as something a reader who might not have the interest or the reading level to get through an entire book would enjoy. One, “Dinosaurs Take Flight,” explains that birds are indeed the descendants of dinosaurs – actually, they are dinosaurs, in Brusatte’s telling – and explains how and why they evolved. The idea of something as complex as an avian wing or an eyeball emerging from the process of evolution is often a stumbling block for those who choose to deny the facts of the matter, but Brusatte lays out the story in plain language, with examples, without detracting from the sheer interest level of what he’s describing. The other is the final chapter, “Dinosaurs Die Out,” which has one of the best pop histories I’ve seen of the discovery of the Chicxulub meteor impact and the Alvarez hypothesis, by the father and son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez. The pair did a bit of forensic geology to discover that the iridium layer in the world’s crust at the K-Pg boundary was too dense and too uniform to have originated on the planet, and thus must have come from an external source. They looked for an impact site from a large meteor or comet and eventually found it in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, a buried crater now known as Chicxulub, a nearby town. Brusatte leads the chapter with a fictional but probable rendition of what the day of impact looked like; the meteor hit at around 67,000 miles per hour, hitting with the force of over 100 trillion tons of TNT, causing earthquakes near 10 on the Richter scale and winds over 600 mph, killing everything within about 600 miles of the blast site.

Brusatte in turn credits Walter Alvarez’s book T. rex and the Crater of Doom as a source, calling it “one of the best pop-science books on paleontology ever written,” high praise as I think Brusatte himself may have written one too. I knew fairly little about dinosaurs coming into the book, other than what I might have learned 35 years ago (probably inaccurate) or learned more recently sitting alongside my daughter, so this book was right in my wheelhouse – a pop-science book that never talks down to the reader but also remembers to provide some fundamental knowledge before deep dives into the specifics. It’s fun, it’s interesting, and Brusatte also manages to make many of the scientists in the book seem like stars (google Jingmai O’Connor, whom he calls the world’s preeminent authority on avian dinosaurs, to see what a cool scientist is like). I’m glad Steve contacted me as the book would likely have slipped right past my radar otherwise.

Next up: I read Nick Drnaso’s Booker Prize-longlisted graphic novel Sabrina today, and just started Patrick Modiano’s novella Missing Person.