Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs!

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, paleontology, dinosaurs, science

Searching for "dinosaur hunter", I had this in mind:

This image is from the Anyone4Science website, which caters to educators and children.

It is way cool to go out in the field, do a bit of digging, and find a big skeleton like this. I have been to Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, where you really can see scenes similar to this, and a preserved cliff has bones sticking out everywhere.

Typically, fossil hunting is rather humdrum. When an animal dies, usually by predation, it doesn't take long for its killer and scavengers to thoroughly dismantle it and scatter the bones while picking them clean. In most environments the bones also are soon dissolved or digested, and nothing will remain. A fossil skeleton such as the one shown is the result of an unlikely series of events, such as sudden burial by a landslide, in either a dry climate or one with a handy bog with reducing conditions. There are also "water traps" such as the La Brea pits in Los Angeles, California or the Mammoth Site near Hot Springs, South Dakota (but there are no dinosaurs in either of those places). So you more typically find scattered bones, or bits of bones, and they have to be sorted and fitted together to assemble a skeleton, or some part of a skeleton.

The recent book The Science of Jurassic World: The Dinosaur Facts Behind the Films, by Mark Brake and Jon Chase, touches on this matter, but focuses more on the science behind the question, "Can dinosaurs really be cloned from ancient mosquito guts?" Spoiler alert: In a word, NO. But it made for a fun premise, as handled by author Michael Crichton for his book Jurassic Park and the series of films still being made in the Jurassic World franchise.

Also, to keep the book from being no more than a pamphlet, the authors dug into quite a variety of matters, such as, "Was Dr. Alan Grant's job a walk in the park?" (Sure, after 3+ decades of study and research), "How Did Dinosaurs Get So Big?" (Call it an arms race, between herbivores that needed to be too big to kill, and predators "growing" to meet the challenge), and "Tyrannosaur family life" (some tyrannosaurs may have hunted in family group packs, but we don't know if T. rex did).

I don't know whether it is a lack of education, or a new habit among writers of the X Generation (and since): Every few pages I encountered a partial sentence. It's like they never discovered the semicolon. Two examples:

"For more than 150 years, people have been mounting dinosaur skeletons for display. Skeletons that were discovered, dug up, and diligently prepared for subsequent analysis and potential mounting." (p 61. The period before "Skeletons" should be replaced by a comma. The second "sentence" doesn't stand on its own.)

"So, dinosaurs evolved relatively rapidly. No doubt driven by shifts in our planet's oceans, climate, and continents." (p 68. While a comma can replace the period before "No", a semicolon is better because of the comma-delimited list later on.)

In either case, the second "sentence", if viewed in isolation, is meaningless. They should actually be dependent clauses. Such instances appear at a rate of one or two per chapter, primarily in the first half of the book. Doesn't anyone employ copy editors any more? Or are copy editors equally at fault?

Out of more than 25 chapters taking up such questions, they could have dispensed entirely with one that was crafted to slander President Trump. There is no science in that chapter; it is a quintessentially ugly bit of polemical politics. As Solomon wrote, 3,000 years ago, "As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor." The authors lost all the regard I had had for them from reading the earlier chapters.

To close the loop: When I searched for "dinosaur hunter", this is typical of what I found:

The image is from an advertisement at ArtStation. 

That hunter looks rather passive in the face of a charging T. rex. Also, he has no hope of surviving unless he is carrying an RPG.