The age of dinosaurs is a perennial favourite on any time traveller’s wishlist. Even though we’re technically still in it — birds carry on the legacy of Velociraptor and company — there’s an irresistible urge to visit the time when towering, scaly, feathery, toothy saurians stomped around the planet. Since backwards time travel is impossible and DNA degrades too fast for us to have any hope of creating a real Jurassic Park, however, what we know of the ‘terrible lizards’ is written in bone and fossil footprints, and paleontologist Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs weaves together these prehistoric pieces into a vibrant view of how dinosaurs originated and what happened to our Mesozoic favourites.
Brusatte, a paleontologist based at Edinburgh University, whose dinosaur-chasing career has taken him to Poland, Brazil, China and elsewhere, is as adept a scientific storyteller as any reader could ask for. This is no small feat. Like many other books by paleontologists, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is part Mesozoic tour and part memoir, using Brusatte’s own experiences and research interests to frame the broader scope of the prehistoric tale. We meet his heroes and colleagues along the way, with specific excavations and field sites forming anchor points to broader concepts about the dinosaur story from their Triassic origin through their Jurassic heyday and ultimately into their Cretaceous decimation.
Digging up bones is naturally part of the tale. ‘We’re obsessed with finding fossils and notorious for going to great (and sometimes stupid) lengths to discover new ones,’ Brusatte writes. But putting all those pieces together into a narrative of how dinosaurs began as tiny pipsqueaks around 235 million years ago and rose to global dominance requires agility with a keyboard rather than the blunt force of a rock hammer.
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