Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life [Hardcover]

If you have even a casual interest in dinosaurs, please get this book. I don't hesitate recommending it to anyone.
Get it for the information on dinosaurs. But you'll love it for the engaging text and the way you will feel part of Dr. Sampson's world. And once you are draw in, you'll be amazed at what else you might learn beyond the world of dinosaurs.
If you know just a little about dinosaurs, I'm sure you know who Dr. Scott Sampson is due to his commentary on dinosaur videos and now on the PBS tyke show "Dinosaur Train." I saw this book at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and then again at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. If those two institutions put it on their bookshelves, there might be something special about the book. The forward by Philip Currie praises the book: "looks not just at dinosaurs but also the at the myriad life-forms that shared their ecosystem, from bacteria to birds. This is done deliberately to show how life-forms interact to form complex, interdependent systems." And what an extraordinary job! Beyond pretty illustrations and art, Dr. Sampson is able to make the whole ecosystem of dinosaurs come to life. But what sends this book beyond the commonplace is the epilogue. If you are not getting the fact that Dr. Sampson is showing you that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the dinosaur's days are the same that are operating today, the epilogue will make it perfectly clear. Here, while talking about the "sixth great extinction event" (the one that we are currently experiencing), the author clearly states how we are part of the interdependent web of all existence. But beyond that, he shows how we need to revise our educational system and the teaching of science to bring awareness of that interconnectivity. It is, in my view, the best science writing ever.
I have read more than 100 books on dinosaurs. This book is at the top of the list. Similar to Robert Bakker's "Dinosaur Heresies" but with a larger scope and more depth.

Like so many other young boys, I loved dinosaurs. My parents would get me books about their world and I would just stare, longingly, at the pictures. I dreamed that there was some obscure mountain valley, a Shangri-La, deep in the Himalayas or an island, far out in the Pacific, where the lived on. But alas, they are gone, like their far older trilobite cousins.
Scott Sampson's Dinosaur Odyssey brings this world back to life. This is a book for the very serious amateur dinosaur lover. I really enjoyed the author's love of complexity, for many of the most core issues about how dinosaurs lived are still mysteries. His discussions on the areas of dinosaur metabolism and evolution were particularly fascinating. Sampson does not take the easy road. Rather, he treats his readers with respect. The interplay of evolution and ecology is not always a simple one and Sampson takes the reader into these occasionally murky areas of research and conjecture in ways that are endlessly intriguing. These discussions became rather complex and I really enjoyed the challenge of fully understanding them. His writing style is both technical and passionate. His love for paleontology shines on every page. I found myself even a little jealous of the author, for so many years ago I considered becoming one myself as a geology minor as an undergraduate. After reading Dinosaur Odyssey, I suspect I made the wrong choice.
With all we seem to know about the world of dinosaurs, I now realize that so many of the key questions continue to be mysteries. What was it like to wander along a Cretaceous era river? How did the air smell (Sampson does make some inferences about this)? Did these giant beasts make lots of sounds? Was there constant terror in the air wondering just how close a Tyrannosaurus might be? We may never know the answers to these questions, but Dinosaur Odyssey does an amazing job of recreating this world in the language of science as well as the senses. My one criticism is that there were too few illustrations showing the environmental context of these ancient plants and animals. I found myself typing in the names of many of these plants and animals into my search window and then clicking on "images" to get a better visual idea of what Sampson was describing.
He does remind us, that the world of the ancient dinosaurs lives with us still. I can hear them just outside my window as I type this review and they feed in my back yard. You might call them birds, but in truth they are the living legacy of the mighty therapods that once aroused terror wherever they went. Now these same therapods glide through the air arousing delight and connecting us back to distant times in their song.

Dinosaur Odyssey takes you on a dinosaur-centric tour of the epic of evolution that literally starts with the Big Bang. The scope of this 332-page book is every bit as expansive as that sentence implies. By page 97, Dr. Scott has treated his readers to clear and entertaining discussions of the Big Bang, geothermal processes, continental drift theory, ecology, evolution, and weather patterns. In the second half of the book, Dr. Scott discusses more obviously paleontological topics, including Mesozoic food chains, predator-prey relationships, climate change and its effect on dinosaur evolution, and inevitably, extinction. There's even a chapter devoted to explaining exactly why Jurassic Park couldn't happen. Along the way, Dr. Scott weaves in fascinating information about the various dinosaur discoveries paleontologists have made in the past twenty-five years.

Processing all that information is no small task. Fortunately, Dr. Scott takes Albert Einstein's principle of science writing to heart: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Take for example, his discussion of plate tectonics in Chapter 4, in which Dr. Scott uses the image of a lava lamp to describe the action of convection forces in the Earth's mantle (p. 56).

There's plenty of humor sprinkled throughout the book as well. For example, in describing the paleontological debate over whether the T. Rex was primarily a hunter or a scavenger of dead meat, Dr. Scott makes the wry comment that the scavenger theory "effectively relegate[s] Tyrannosaurus to the status of prehistory's biggest maggot."

If you love dinosaurs, you'll love this book.

(Read more at my blog, BostonWriters.wordpress.com.)

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