ARCHOSAURIA: A New Look at the Old Dinosaur

by John McLoughlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1979

McLoughlin, who filled us in on our closer-to-home inquilines in The Animals Among Us (1978), now adds his voice to the burgeoning defense of the long-maligned dinosaur--whose Mesozoic victory he labels ""the most important achievement of terrestrial vertebrates before the appearance of humans."" No longer the sluggish, ""dimbulb,"" swamp-dwelling reptiles of 19th-century imagination, the new dinosaurs are erect, agile, and warmblooded--metabolically sophisticated creatures who run in packs and tend their young, and whose small brains signify not stupidity but ""only a nonmammalian nervous organization."" Birds, as we're now aware, are dinosaurs, ""no more or less."" As for how the subclass died out, McLoughlin rejects the old, lame stabs at explanations and puts forth a ""pet theory"" involving atmospheric conditions which would affect the photosynthetic process--and thus all the most energy-consumptive, active beasts at the tops of their food chains. McLoughlin looks at different groups of dinosaurs in roughly evolutionary order, and he is especially good at integrating the hows and whys of development with descriptions of particular features. His suggestions--even down to such specifics as the functions of the sauropods' high nostrils, the hadrosaurs' crowns, and tyrannosaurus rex's tiny forearms--will not be new to readers of Adrian Desmond's The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs, which put the revisionist case to the public back in 1976. But McLoughlin offers a more streamlined summary of the new ideas, he writes with more grace than the subject usually inspires, and his delicate fine-line drawings will do much for the dinosaur's new image.

Pub Date: May 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION