All my troubles seemed so far away…
“What images come to mind when you hear the word ‘dinosaur’?”
Few things are as exciting to discover when you’re a child than the existence of dinosaurs, and nothing is more tragic than the follow up lesson that tells you none of them are around anymore. Children seem naturally drawn to dinosaurs – they have been given the role of actual monsters, the closest things to aliens that we have. And it isn’t just children, because secretly I think that every adult is also still obsessed with them.
This book, therefore, isn’t really a children’s book, but rather a picture book for adults based on modern scientific findings. It’s a short book and contains illustrations and short pieces on the appearance and behaviour of dinosaurs, suggesting that we’ve got it all wrong. It points out that not only will things like colour, behaviour and sound never be fossilised, neither will skin, feathers, cartilage or fur. Who’s to say that the sauropods didn’t have huge flaps of skin around their necks? What if that isn’t a sail on Dimetrodon‘s back, but rather a hump? Did Carnatosaurus‘s tiny arms act as a way to attract a mate? It’s entirely based on speculation, but with a firm grounding in the appearance and behaviour of current species, allowing us to see an alternate history to the one we’re used to.
BUT then halfway through the book things take a turn for the even more bizarre and we are shown reconstructions by future archaeologists of creatures that live in our time. How wrong may they get it? What mistakes will they make? By showing familiar animals in a new light that can only be inferred from the remaining bones, it highlights everything that’s been shown in the book’s first half. The illustrations are all beautiful and in this section we see such animals as the lithe cow (its large fat reserves would never fossilise), the hippopotamus (mistaken as an epex predator, given its teeth), the swan (wings mistaken for spear-like forelimbs) and the python (assumed to have legs, but none have yet been discovered). Even the elephant is displayed here, although lacks a trunk, given that it has no bones and therefore is unlikely to survive, and whales and hummingbirds are both completely twisted and displayed in new ways.
It’s an interesting and engaging book. Although just shy of 100 pages, I could happily sit and devour 1000 pages of this stuff. A very clever, beautiful and thoughtful look at one of the most interesting topics I can think of.
