A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils

Giving an overview of all of dino-dom in just 50 fossils and a mere 160 pages might seem like a tall order. Fortunately, palaeontologist Paul M. Barrett, a Merit Researcher in the Earth Science Department of the London Natural History Museum (NHM), is no stranger to writing popular works on dinosaurs. This handsomely illustrated hardback will do well in the museum's gift shop.

A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils follows the same concept and format as the preceding A History of Life in 100 Fossils and A History of Plants in 50 Fossils, and consists of fifty illustrated 2–4 page essays. These can be read separately and out of order but, having read the book cover to cover as is my habit, they flow into each other logically. The book is presented in three parts; an introduction to dinosaurs with an overview of their macroevolution, brief biographies of every major group and what sets them apart, and a section on dinosaur biology. Each essay takes a particular fossil as its linchpin, understandably leaning on the NHM's renowned collections and Barrett's research experience, but also showcases other fossils from institutions around the world.

Despite this being an entry-level book, Barrett does not dumb things down. I appreciated how he shows that many topics in palaeontology are not settled science and remain subject to debate. Thus, he follows Seeley's traditional taxonomical division of Dinosauria into Saurischia and Ornithischia, while acknowledging recent but still controversial proposals that reorganise the dinosaur family tree. Other, slightly more tangible debates should be familiar to palaeontology-buffs. Did Spinosaurus swim or merely wade in the shallows? How well could Archaeopteryx fly? He also discusses how ideas have changed over time. How do we know what colour dinosaurs had in life? His stock answer used to be that we have to use our imagination as fossils do not preserve colours. "How wrong I was" (p. 98): microscopic examination of fossilised melanosomes has given us clues and is but one example of what the study of ancient biomolecules is revealing. Similarly, we used to think dinosaurs grew slowly, taking many decades to attain their sometimes gargantuan size. Histological examination of bones, however, has shown that they reached adult size in a mere 25–30 years.

The palaeobiology section was of particular interest to me. Next to the more "obvious" topics that rely on body fossils (e.g. the evolution of feathers or the morphological adaptations to different diets), he also covers the wonderful research on trace fossils such as fossil trackways or coprolites, and research that reconstructs behaviour. I want to highlight the essay on sexing dinosaurs in particular as an example of how to succinctly but carefully walk the reader through the difficulties and pitfalls of different ways of tackling a research question.

The two quibbles I have with the written content are minor. There are no references included, just a very brief "further reading" section at the back. Given the book's target audience, this is defensible, though it would require some research if you wanted to follow up on interesting statements such as fossils of young ankylosaurs possibly lacking fully formed armour. The other, more surprising omission is that there is no introduction to the changing face of the planet over deep time, while he does repeatedly mention how animals were able to spread from one continent to another. The average reader might struggle to visualise where now-separated continents were located. My go-to reference is admittedly rather technical; instead, Barker & Naish authored an innovative dinosaur atlas for young readers not so long ago, and there is always Ian Webster's wonderful Ancient Globe freely accessible online.

The other pillar the book leans on is its illustrations. As the title would suggest, the book focuses on fossils, with only a handful of diagrams and pieces of palaeoart. There is a nice mix of photos of whole skeletons (both mounted and in their matrix) and individual bones. Barrett of course includes well-known skeletons that visitors to the NHM will have marvelled at, such as the Diplodocus nicknamed "Dippy", their Stegosaurus mount, or the London specimen of Archaeopteryx. However, there are also lesser-known specimens such as the amazing titanosaur egg that hid unnoticed in the museum's mineralogy collection for some 180 years (!), or a partial skeleton of an armoured Scolosaurus showing both the upper and underside. Only one illustration features a box to outline an easily missed detail (the gut contents of a Gorgosaurus) and I would have liked to see some labels or boxes on other photos to help the untrained eye. Some photos are hard to make sense of, for instance, the Pantydraco specimen or the sediment-filled brain cavity of Iguanodon (though try and spot the semicircular canals in that photo). For those who care about such details, there is an innovative visual index at the end with museum accession numbers and details of origin. For some reason, the few palaeoart pieces are also included here, although the credits have been put in a separate section at the very end.

There is stiff competition in the category of entry-level dinosaur books and you might well wonder how this book compares to Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved which Barrett co-authored with Darren Naish (the NHM published a revised second edition just last year). This is where I feel that the concept of A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils gets somewhat in the way as the Naish & Barrett book can go into more detail. If I were handed some pocket money in the museum shop and told that I could buy just one book, I personally would choose Naish & Barrett's for its more exhaustive coverage. A similar observation can be made about Donald Prothero's The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries which has a comparable concept. With 25 essays spread over 472 pages, it can obviously develop each topic in more depth. However, for novices and younger readers, or for those looking to gift a book that is not too intimidating to such readers, this is a neat package that gives an up-to-date overview of dinosaur biology in easily digestible essays.