Hone successfully integrates two equally fascinating stories: how our knowledge of these fabulous creatures was pieced...
Our fascination with Tyrannosaurus rex, the aptly named king of the dinosaurs, has been fed by Jurassic Park and other films, but the reality is equally entrancing.
The story of the tyrannosaurs, writes Hone (Ecology/Queen Mary Univ. of London), “covers more than 100 million years of paleontological history, and over a century of scientific research.” The author, an internationally recognized authority on dinosaurs whose own research has focused on tyrannosaurs, describes them as “icons of evolution and of the dinosaurs as a whole,” and he believes that the focus of research on them has been encouraged by “its overexposure in the public eye (and in some scientific circles as well).” Hone chronicles the series of discoveries over the past 100 years since a dinosaur jaw and teeth were found in Britain. These bones have allowed scientists, including the author, to piece together the dinosaurs' history and aspects of their behavior. While correctly surmising that tyrannosaurs and other dinosaurs were carnivores, scientists erroneously assumed that they were some kind of previously unknown “giant land reptile.” Subsequent fossil discoveries in polar regions ruled out this possibility since coldblooded reptiles could not survive such extreme cold weather. For 100 million years, these “largest terrestrial carnivores of all time, with giant heads and huge teeth,” dominated the Earth. Teeth and other fossil evidence point to the likelihood that they were carnivorous hunters rather than scavengers, as does the placement of their eye sockets, which indicates binocular vision. The fossil record reveals “a massive change in the make-up of life on earth,” likely due to a disastrous climate change that occurred some 66 million years ago—a series of events that precipitated a relatively short (in geological terms) extinction event “lasting perhaps just a few tens of thousands of years.”
Hone successfully integrates two equally fascinating stories: how our knowledge of these fabulous creatures was pieced together over time and what we can infer about them.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4729-1125-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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