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30 Days Of Meme - Day 4
Jun. 10th, 2010 10:17 pmYour Favourite Book.
Fiction or non-fiction? Pictures with little or no text, or dense reference-laden treatises? I love them all, in different ways for different things. I read text-books for pleasure, I'll turn the pages of a gallery portfolio and marvel at the images, and I'll sit happily living in an authors world for a few days while their story unfolds around me. The hundred and fifty plus books I have immediately to hand range from Museum Ethics, through Henry Rousseau, Sponges of the Burgess Shale, Richard Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype, a well-thumbed copy of At the Mountains of Madness, and Iain M. Banks' The Alegbraist. That's just what I brought (and since acquired) when I moved back to London. There's another couple of hundred back there, (most of the Pratchetts, University-level biology, some wonderful old 1920s & 30s science books, etc, etc.)
I'm expected to choose one? I can't. I'll give you a recommendation though. It doesn't contain awesome quotes about the power and impressiveness of evolution, or geology. There are no laugh-out-loud moments like Pratchett, nor does it make me grin like an idiot while reading it as Charles Stross does in The Atrocity Archives, and The Jennifer Morgue (Mi5 vs. Lovecraftian horrors, as written by Len Deighton & Ian Fleming- my gods its wonderful stuff).
I'm going to talk about Adrian Desmond's 1976 book The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs. Sadly it seems to be out of print.
Written just before cladistics took over as the dominant paradigm for evolutionary biology, and as Robert Bakker, Greg Paul and co. were just beginning their careers. At this point dinosaurs were still often considered to be sluggish cold-blooded animals, the dinosaurs to birds theory, was only just getting off the ground. The book documents the beginnings of the "dinosaur renaissance" which continues to this day. What it also does is provide a historical study of Mesozoic Vertebrate palaeontology, looking at the 19th century work Owen did on mammals, Baron Cuvier's work on pterosaurs, and of course Gideon Mantell, the "Bone Wars" of Marsh and Cope, and the early 20th century work of Nopsca, Barnum Brown, and Hatcher and Tournier's arguments about the stance of Diplodocus, are all covered.
I'm less interested in the arguments presented here in favour of warm-blooded dinosaurs- they are in many cases of their time- there was no evidence of feathers in any theropod known at this time, and the work on growth-rates, predator-prey ratios, and other things that have made homeothermy the generally favoured view (at least for most dinosaurs, if not necessarily all of them), were either equivocal, or unpublished at the time. And in fact this is something I like about the book. It has become a historical document, a snapshot of a moment in the history of science in the years around the time I was born.
Fiction or non-fiction? Pictures with little or no text, or dense reference-laden treatises? I love them all, in different ways for different things. I read text-books for pleasure, I'll turn the pages of a gallery portfolio and marvel at the images, and I'll sit happily living in an authors world for a few days while their story unfolds around me. The hundred and fifty plus books I have immediately to hand range from Museum Ethics, through Henry Rousseau, Sponges of the Burgess Shale, Richard Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype, a well-thumbed copy of At the Mountains of Madness, and Iain M. Banks' The Alegbraist. That's just what I brought (and since acquired) when I moved back to London. There's another couple of hundred back there, (most of the Pratchetts, University-level biology, some wonderful old 1920s & 30s science books, etc, etc.)
I'm expected to choose one? I can't. I'll give you a recommendation though. It doesn't contain awesome quotes about the power and impressiveness of evolution, or geology. There are no laugh-out-loud moments like Pratchett, nor does it make me grin like an idiot while reading it as Charles Stross does in The Atrocity Archives, and The Jennifer Morgue (Mi5 vs. Lovecraftian horrors, as written by Len Deighton & Ian Fleming- my gods its wonderful stuff).
I'm going to talk about Adrian Desmond's 1976 book The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs. Sadly it seems to be out of print.
Written just before cladistics took over as the dominant paradigm for evolutionary biology, and as Robert Bakker, Greg Paul and co. were just beginning their careers. At this point dinosaurs were still often considered to be sluggish cold-blooded animals, the dinosaurs to birds theory, was only just getting off the ground. The book documents the beginnings of the "dinosaur renaissance" which continues to this day. What it also does is provide a historical study of Mesozoic Vertebrate palaeontology, looking at the 19th century work Owen did on mammals, Baron Cuvier's work on pterosaurs, and of course Gideon Mantell, the "Bone Wars" of Marsh and Cope, and the early 20th century work of Nopsca, Barnum Brown, and Hatcher and Tournier's arguments about the stance of Diplodocus, are all covered.
I'm less interested in the arguments presented here in favour of warm-blooded dinosaurs- they are in many cases of their time- there was no evidence of feathers in any theropod known at this time, and the work on growth-rates, predator-prey ratios, and other things that have made homeothermy the generally favoured view (at least for most dinosaurs, if not necessarily all of them), were either equivocal, or unpublished at the time. And in fact this is something I like about the book. It has become a historical document, a snapshot of a moment in the history of science in the years around the time I was born.
