I loved My Beloved Brontosaurus. I really did. I was trying to pinpoint some sort of flaw as a reason why I would rate this book anything other than five stars, and I couldn’t. Maybe you’re not into science or dinosaurs (if that is the case, why did you pick this book up to begin with?). But I do love dinosaurs, truly, and the author takes some 200 years of paleontological research, including controversial updates, and synthesizes it into 222 pages of accessible, engaging science. I found it delightful, and inspiring.
For a topic as dry as dinosaur bones, the writing is funny. The entire chapter on dinosaur sex (at this point, discussed in hypotheticals) is pure gold, providing several laugh-out-loud moments, and at one point, prompting me to grab my phone to tweet a line. The book follows a practical procession of dinosaurs’ lifecycles, from conception to their inevitable (maybe), untimely (perhaps) destruction. Switek makes multiple detours along the way for recent scientific revelations, and those revelations hold the heart of the book.
Switek (an amateur paleontologist, freelance science writer, and the dinosaur adviser on “Jurassic World”) is appealing in particular to latent dino lovers who discovered the giants at a similar age to himself – late ’80s/early ’90s millenials whose worlds were rocked when the Brontosaurus was relegated to Pluto-status (or rather, denounced as not a dinosaur, was never a dinosaur, and should never have been named a dinosaur to begin with). I mention the age not because I think it should exclude anyone who was not a “true 90s kid,” but rather because I relate to that viewpoint so well. I understand exactly where Switek is coming from. So much of contemporary conventional paleontology has changed since my second grade dinosaur unit. I think sometimes, as learners, we are taught “facts” that stick in our brains, immobilized, almost fossils themselves, until something comes to root them out. This book makes a first-rate shovel.
This review has been cross-posted to the Cannonball Read. My goal is to read 52 books in 2016.
Tera Brasel 