T. rex and the Crater of Doom

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I had hitherto avoided this book because, from the title and cover, it looks like a book written for 12 year olds. And maybe that was Alvarez's publisher's target demographic. Of course, in 1997 when T. rex and the Crater of Doom was published I was otherwise occupied. Then I passed over it to pick up the much more scholarly Complete Dinosaur the next year. I saw it a few more times over the years after that, but, not knowing who Walter Alvarez was, passed it over. Fast forward to this year, when I ran into it at McKay's. By now I knew who Walter Alvarez was and was surprised to see him as the author of such a dippy looking book. Alvarez, working with his Nobel laureate dad at UC Berkeley, discovered the iridium layer that marks the KT boundary and brought catastrophism back to geology.

This book represents Alvarez's firsthand account of that discovery and subsequent developments. He includes a number of his missteps, including first positing a supernova rather than a comet as the source of the iridium. It's also instructive to see him going off in one direction only to have another scientist discover the answer in another direction. Alvarez had his fair share of I-wish-I'd-thought-of-that moments as we all do.

Moral of the story: don't judge a book by its cover!