【 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DINOSAURS 】

Genre: Non-fiction (natural history)
Audience: Adult
Author: Steve Brusatte
Published: April 2018
Publisher: Macmillan
Pages: 404 pp (Paperback)

I really am a big fan of Brusatte at this point. Having read The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us before this one, I knew I would be in for a good time and it didn’t disappoint.

I was blown away by the first book by Brusatte that I read, and while I’ll straight up admit that I don’t think anything will come close to the feeling of reading one of his books for the first time, this was still super fun.

He really has a way with making what could be boring fact-dump into an enthralling narrative. With anecdotal stories interspersed throughout the fact-driven history of the evolution and demise of the dinosaurs, this really is an engaging non-fiction read.

If you’re a fan of dinosaurs (you can’t tell me you’re not – it’s dinosaurs after all!), then I highly recommend this as an excellent book to dip your toe into. I actually really appreciated the order in which I read his books, because The Rise and Reign of the Mammals feels slightly more comprehensive from a big-picture perspective and then everything you learn about the dinosaurs in this slotted into that knowledge and big-picture stuff really nicely.

I can never decide when reading his books if I wish I were a palaeontologist because of all the places he’s visited and the epic things he’s discovered, or if it sounds like my worst nightmare of hot, back-breaking tedium. It’s a tough call.

What I’ve gained from reading this, is an insatiable desire to draw up a list of all the museums he’s referenced throughout and go on a wild travel-spree to visit them all (ahh, if money were no object). I do love discovering about these cool finds and fascinating discoveries in his books, because Brusatte always tells you were you can go see them and there’s something very exciting about the opportunity to see what it is he’s talking about in real life.

Plus, it’s great fun silently mouthing all the dinosaur names you’re unfamiliar with and trying to work out how to say them. I do also enjoy Googling alongside my reading to look up what all these strange creatures look like whenever there weren’t photos of the fossils accompanying the text.

So in short? Dinosaurs = a good time. And, dinosaurs + Brusatte = the best time.

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Title: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
Author: Steve Brusatte
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Sixty-six million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, a new generation of dinosaur hunters are piecing together the complete history of how the dinosaurs created a hugely successful empire that lasted for around 150 million years.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a hugely ambitious and engrossing story of how dinosaurs rose to dominate the planet, written by one of the world’s leading palaeontologists. Using fossil clues that have been gathered with state-of-the-art technology, Brusatte traces these magnificent creatures from the Early Triassic period at the start of their evolution, through the Jurassic period, to their final catastrophic days in the Cretaceous and the legacy that they left behind.

Along the way, Brusatte introduces us to a cast of new dinosaur hunters and gives an insight into what being a paleontologist is really like. He offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable discoveries he has made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs, monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex and feathered raptor dinosaurs from China buried in volcanic ash.

At a time when Homo sapiens has existed for less than 200,000 years and we are already talking about planetary extinction, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a timely reminder of what humans can learn from the magnificent creatures who ruled the earth before us.