The Dinosaur Hunters review

 

Just like the ROM visit, I got several books for my birthday. One of them is today's subject, The Dinosaur Hunters*, a book about the history of palaeontology and the study dinosaurs, from the origins of the subject to the impact dinosaurs have on pop culture. It is written by Lowell Dingus with help from Mark Norell, both from and book helped by the venerable American Museum of Natural History.

* Not to be confused with another non-fiction book of the same name and subject by Deborah Cadbury.

The contents of it are fairly broad in scope. It goes chronologically, and a basic list summary is:

• Origins of Palaeontology, from the Greek Xenophanes observing fossil shells in mountains to Nicolas Steno's work in geology against Church's dogma.
• England's discoveries, such as William Buckland and Megalosaurus, the Mantells discovering and describing Iguanodon, and Crystal Palace Park.
• During and beyond the 1870's, Belgium sees the discovery of more Iguanodon that change the shape of it while the Bone Wars in Western US happen, bringing to light the most famous dinosaurs, while Charles R. Knight illustrates.
• The early 1900's see noted fossil hunters the Sternbergs and Barnum Brown in North America, while Egypt and Tanzania in Africa sees discoveries of giant dinosaurs.
• The mid-1900's see the AMNH make expeditions into Mongolia courtesy of Roy Chapman Andrews.
• The Dinosaur Renaissance begins with Deinonychus changing attitudes on dinosaurs to fleet-footed and successful.
• The multitude of dinosaur discoveries in the last then-20 years, from eggs in Montana and Argentina by Horner and Luis Chiappe, Paul Sereno in Niger, Argentina, and India, and Madagascar, Dinosaurs at the poles, as well as more fossil finds in Mongolia and feathered ones in China.
• The leading theories on what killed the dinosaurs and the Alvarez family's theory of an Asteroid strike.
• Whether we could resurrect dinosaurs with DNA experimenting.

Typical example of a page spread

The layout of each page is fairly standard but informative and competent, with beige box insets highlighting certain relevant palaeontologists or information. It's honestly not worth talking about. Moving on.

There aren't any original palaeoart in the book, rather using examples from history. Naturally, Charles R. Knight gets an entire chapter to himself, which is a decent outline for one to start with.  Probably the one I like the most out of it is this one.

Its a one newspaper article about Tendaguru featuring the now-invalid genus Gigantosaurus by a lake dwarfing a crocodile, if only because I'd never seen that particular before and looks quite interesting.

Otherwise, the book relies on archival photos for the most part. Not much is worth commenting on there either.

I first thought the book was fairly recently made, like 2019 at a minimum. However, as I flipped through it, in one chapter on Tendaguru, I noticed that they were calling Giraffatitan Brachiosaurus, and that Brontosaurus is treated as a synonym of Apatosaurus. "Odd," I thought. "Shouldn't it be different?". When I looked it online and checked the book, it turns out the book's from 2008, yet the edition was published in 2021. This means it was released right at a time when palaeomedia's mainstream popularity was winding down and limited to books, games, and especially web media, and the hyperviolent, monstrous beasts that are awesomebro had emerged. Fortunately, nothing like that is here other then when people actually thought that.

I'll be honest that as I prefer my books up to date and recent, these discrepancies do distract from my reading experience, and may not be as informative to readers born after the date of publication then before. These Science Marches Ons provide the bulk of the book's inaccuracies. Thankfully, that's all the blatant inaccuracies I can tell so far. That's to be expected when the book is less about the science itself then the history of it.

Ooh boy! Bureaucracy! Just what people asked for in my dinosaur book![/sarcasm]

I don't like focus on documents the book has. Sure they do have historical context to them, but in a book about dinosaurs and palaeontology, it feels very tedious to do so. Its somewhat more tolerable when its field notes and scientific papers, but when you get passports having their own overleafs, I feel your intentions are a bit skewed. But that's just in my book, because puns funny.

If I were the one publishing the book, I'd try and go into the more unsavoury aspects of palaeontology's history, like how Henry Osborn and many other palaeontologists were very much bigoted white nationalists who pushed on the inferiority of nonwhites, and how most fossil discoveries in Africa in the early 1900's were steeped in the colonialism of the age.
Alternatively, if it were a republishing, I'd do the mandatory updating of palaeontology, like changing names. Naturally, the great fossil finds of the 2010's would also be highlighted.

I'd also alter the last section of the book either way, one on DNA and clearly inspired by a certain film franchise, to being about dinosaurs' influence on pop culture in general.

• Accuracy - 9/10
• Aging - 7/10
• Presentation - 8/10
• Illustrations - 5/10
• Storytelling - 8/10
• Rereadability - 8/10

While compared to other works The Dinosaur Hunters is a bit basic and more of an outline with not much nuance, it is a good read for what it is: a story not so much about dinosaurs as they people who discover and research them. I'm sure it is and will be nice to read in a school library (not an insult) and if you grew up reading it, I'm glad you got to read it and hopefully acted as a springboard.

Thanks for reading!