A Review of The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs by Fastovsky & Weishampel

Since the last book I read on dinosaurs was in 1998 (Farlow & Brett-Surman's book), when I saw this gem at McKay's Used Books I couldn't resist picking it up. Sure, it was from 2005 and so wouldn't include information about feather indentations in velociraptor bones, the DNA of tyrannosaurs, or torosaurus actually being the adult form of triceratops, but it was a second edition which means enough people found the first edition useful that it warranted updating. Luckily I was not disappointed. Now when I first started reading it I must admit I was a little put off. Firstoff, they limited their definition of dinosauria to land dwelling creatures which is something I'm not sure I agree with. Then when introducing cladograms they chose to use motor vehicles as an example, a choice which seems utterly idiotic! Getting into the meat of the material the book began to shine. The first half is primarily descriptive paleontology, with chapters introducing each of the main dinosaur clades, describing their features and relationships to other clades as well as the history and geographical distributions of major discoveries. The big drawback of this cladistic perspective is that they leave out a lot of the temporal information which one would expect to find in a book including the word "Evolution" in the title. The last clade described, however, is Therapoda and the authors use it to provide an entrepôt to the evolution of birds. Having raised, slaughtered, and eaten chickens I found the anatomical comparisons here particularly insightful, especially the authors' frequent references to buffalo wings. A more accurate title might be have been The Evolution of Birds From Dinosaurs because there isn't a whole lot of discussion about the overall evolution of dinosauria through the Mezozoic, although some context is given for individual clades. The book ends, naturally, on the subject of extinction and provides the overwhelming evidence for the meteor impact although it is primarily correlative and there isn't a well-established mechanism for how a meteor impact causes a mass extinction. Despite its shortcomings overall I really enjoyed the book.