Review: The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs

 I wish I had known about The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs back when Boen was in his dinosaur phase. This book is an encyclopedic dossier on dinosaurs, fossils, the history of dinosaur research, the big asteroid catastrophe (and how that theory was formulated and later proven). Each chapter has a beautiful illustration of a dinosaur, and full illustrations of the various fossils are depicted in photos.

The book has several details about dinosaurs that taught me new things:

Maybe you’ve heard the rumor that T. rex liked its meat dead and rotten, that Rex was a scavenger, a seven-ton carcass collector too slow, too stupid, or too big to hunt for its own fresh food. This accusation seems to make the rounds every few years, one of those stories that science reporters can’t get enough of. Don’t believe it. It defies common sense that an agile and energetic animal with a knife-toothed head nearly the size of a Smart car wouldn’t use its well-endowed anatomy to take down prey but would just walk around picking up leftovers. It also runs against what we know about modern carnivores: very few meat-eaters are pure scavengers, and the outliers that do it well—vultures, for instance—are fliers that can survey wide areas from above and swoop down whenever they see (or smell) a decaying body. Most carnivores, on the other hand, actively hunt but also scavenge whenever they have the chance. After all, who turns down a free meal? That’s true of lions, leopards, wolves, even hyenas, which are not the pure scavengers of legend but actually earn much of their food through the chase. Like these animals, T. rex was probably both a hunter and an opportunistic scavenger. (kindle loc 2338)

 It taught me the pterosaus/pterodactyls were not dinosaurs (I always associated them with dinosaurs but they're actually reptiles). Birds by contrast are dinosaurs and have lungs that are very different from ours:

The lungs of sauropods were very similar to those of birds and very different from ours. While mammals have a simple lung that breathes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide in a cycle, birds have what is called a unidirectional lung: air flows across it in one direction only, and oxygen is extracted during both inhalation and exhalation. The bird-style lung is extra efficient, sucking up oxygen with each breath in and each exhalation. It’s an astounding feature of biological engineering, made possible by a series of balloonlike air sacs connected to the lung, which store some of the oxygen-rich air taken in during inhalation, so that it can be passed across the lung during exhalation. Don’t worry if it sounds confusing: it is such a strange lung that it took biologists many decades to figure out how it works. (kindle loc 1357)

I don't think this is as good a book as The Rise and Reign of Mammals. (This is a case of the sequel being better than the original)  But if you like dinosaurs and can't get enough of them (there's a whole chapter about T Rex!) this is the book to get!