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Books : Science & Nature : Earth Sciences & Geography : Palaeontology : Palaeozoology
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Sea Monsters is the book version of the latest offering from the BBC TV "Walking With" series, except that this one is really "Diving with Sea Monsters". It has all the ingredients we have come to expect, especially the superb computer graphics that really bring these extinct beasts to life and the numerous gobsmacking colour plates. The sleek bodies of these sea creatures lend themselves particularly well to the technique. They look extraordinarily convincing as they have a go at presenter Nigel Marven in his armoured diving suit and metal cage.Written by the well-known TV presenter Nigel Marven and producer/director Jasper James, Sea Monsters tells the story of a huge range of extinct beasts from Ordovician times, through some 450 million years of geological time and the evolution of marine life. Although the first life on Earth was aquatic, for the first four billion and more years it was all microscopic. About 600 million years ago sea creatures began to get bigger but none of them was anything much more than a metre in length until Ordovician and Silurian times when the marine arms race began with both predators and prey increasing significantly in size. Things got really interesting in Devonian times when some bizarre fish evolved as active predators including the spectacularly ferocious nine-metre long Dunkleosteus. This magnificent creature had tough bony armoured plates all over its head and blades of bone instead of teeth.
Life in the seas has been dangerous ever since, as successions of large predatory sharks, bony fish, marine reptiles and mammals have evolved and replaced one another. Today's great white shark might have notoriety as an awesome predator but it is small beer compared with Liopleurodon, the 20-metre or so marine reptile of Jurassic times or the more recent shark Megalodon whose teeth were palm sized and whose jaws opened to around 2.5 metres wide. It's all spendidly bloodthirsty stuff for children of any age from 9 to 99. --Douglas Palmer
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Walking with Beasts is the eagerly anticipated follow-up to the hugely successful Walking with Dinosaurs and fully deserves to be just as successful. Subtitled A Prehistoric Safari, it takes the reader on a journey through the wildlife parks of the last 65 million years since the demise of the dinosaurs.While everyone has heard of the many different kinds of dinosaurs, how many people have heard of the indricotheres, chalicotheres, dinotheres or even our own ancestors the plesiadapiforms? Hopefully, after the showing of the BBC TV series Walking with Beasts and this superb book from Tim Haines, we might have a better idea about the life and times of our own mammal relatives and ancestors. Designed for the general reader, the story follows a mixture of chronology and environmental themes from the "New Dawn" following the demise of the dinosaurs, when mammals were just beginning to find their feet again, through to "Whale Killer", describing when mammals first took to life in the oceans and evolved awesome top predators such as the 18m Basilosaurus. The strange extinct mammals such as the indricotheres figure in the "Land of the Giants" and our own human story is told, culminating in the Ice Age and the question of our ancestors' hand in extinctions. The computer-generated images produced by Daren Horley's team are absolutely stunning and are, if anything, better than those in Walking with Dinosaurs. The animals look especially convincing in the still photos, which appear on every page. The pictures are so good that it will be hard to convince younger children that they are not real. Walking with Beasts should be on everyone's shopping list. --Douglas Palmer
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It may seem surprising but dinosaurs are actually a British "invention" of the early 19th century. The name dinosaur was coined in 1842 by an English anatomist Richard Owen, a highly ambitious, machiavellian schemer and villain of Deborah Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World. Her hero is Gideon Mantell, a practising doctor, who found and first described many of the bones of the beasts that subsequently became known as dinosaurs. Full of quotes from contemporary sources, The Dinosaur Hunters brilliantly evokes the Dickensian world of early Victorian science and society. From Mary Anning, the self-taught fossil hunter of Lyme Regis to the academic and deeply eccentric Dean Buckland of Oxford University, the story tells of reputations made and lost as self-help, self-promotion, over-wheening pride, folly and social climbing all played their part in the emerging story of the geological past. The dinosaurs, although central to the story, are also a vehicle for the much larger, more interesting and important story about the struggle to understand the meaning of fossils and what they tell us about prehistory. Deborah Cadbury, an award-winning TV science producer and acclaimed author of The Feminisation of Nature has thoroughly researched her topic and steeped herself in the intricacies of the scientific debates of the time. With black and white illustrations, extensive notes, a bibliography and index, the result is one of the best popular science histories. --Douglas Palmer.
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