Writing this review today feels a bit like cheating.

It feels a bit like cheating because I haven’t quite finished The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs yet. I’ve still got just a little less than one hundred pages left before I can mark it ‘finished’ on Goodreads.

However, #JurassicJune does not wait while I discuss Kratos’ Adventures in Egypt, or the marks and signs of magic. It cares little for things like Memorial Day celebrations, or the slow and deliberate notes that I’ve been filling my Obsidian vault with while reading this book . . .

It comes.

As the Jurassic gave way to the Cretaceous (words I feel much more comfortable slinging about because of reading this book), so too has May seceded to June, and all its #WyrdAndWonder of Fantasy evolves into the dinosaur themed goodness of #JurassicJune.

The first link in that chain is June 1st, #DinosaurDay. My approach this year is much the same as in years past, namely to review some non-fiction title which would teach me something about dinosaurs.

Back in 2021, I reviewed Kenneth Lacovara’s Why Dinosaurs Matter, a TED-Talk-turned-book which follows Lacovara’s career and served as a great entry point for me, just beginning to learn about the history of paleontology and the concepts necessary to further study these amazing creatures we call dinosaurs.

Last year (2022), I talked about Darren Naish’s Dinopedia: A Brief Compendium of Dinosaur Lore. I felt this book brought me firmly away from shallows and into the depth and intricacies of the discipline. Naish’s prose are funny, ironic, and sometimes serious, but always comprehensible and enlightening. With entries on each of the dinosaur clades, history of famous paleontologists, and their significance to science and popular culture, I’d say this is a handy reference for anyone looking to broaden their knowledge on this subject.

And this year, 2023, we tackle Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs. I say tackle, because of the entries I’ve discussed so far, this book is by far the longest. Including the notes and index (which I intend to read), TRaFotD is just over 400 pages while Naish and Lacovara’s books are a scant 215 and 192 pages respectively.

TRaFotD follows a format familiar to me from books like The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, or even Why Dinosaurs Matter, which mixes the personal experience of the paleontologist with the history and science they are writing about. Consider a chef stirring a large pot of textbook, and adding a dash of memoir here and there for taste, and you’ll have a good idea of how this book reads. Even if it’s something common among these types of books, it seems a very good way to spice up what might otherwise be a very dull read (even for dinosaur enthusiasts like myself).

In terms of the content covered, TRaFotD is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, walking readers through each period of geological history and describing what was going on in the world at the moment different dinosaurs lived. I was quite shocked to find how harsh the conditions were during certain periods and how volatile. Megamonsoons in the Triassic, and 3,000 foot thick lava tsunamis in the later parts of that period? No thank you.

In my post reviewing Jurassic Park after a decade, I mentioned briefly an argument from Malcom’s character that humanity does not have the power to destroy or save the planet, and how awkwardly that section reads in light of Chrichton’s remarks at Cal Tech in 2003 (essentially denying climate change).

After reading the green-house gas fueled conditions the dinosaurs endured, without any humans around to contribute one way or another, I can see how easy it might be to think that our impact is negligible when looking at history through a geological lens.

I don’t think that is a stance this book takes; I’d imagine Brusatte has the opposite view in fact, but it was still interesting to discover nonetheless.

(Also there must be some irony that burning fossils is recreating the world in which those fossils were created).

Returning to the review itself, I would like to reiterate just how jam-packed this book is with prehistoric life. At only 300 pages in, I’ve already taken notes on over fifty types of reptile, mammal, dinosauromorph, and actual dinosaurs (part of the reason I’m moving so slow is all the notes). This might seem overwhelming (and looked at statistically it kinda is), but it never feels that way while reading.

Of course Brusatte talks about all of the major players that any child would recognize like T-Rex, Brontosaurus, Triceratops etc. but these are really only a small fraction of the types of creatures which made dinosaurs so fascinating, and Brusatte is not afraid to explore them all. This approach not only allows us to engage with new, or lesser-known dinos, but also sends us to places around the globe such as Poland, Argentina, Scottland and many more where these dinosaurs were discovered.

I probably only have a few gripes with the book, and each are quite surmountable in the end.

First, there are maps of how the continents looked at different stages during Earth’s history which despite Brusatte’s excellent descriptions, I still found necessary to look at. I only wish they had been mixed within the text and not just dumped in the beginning. Considering I struggled with a lack of positioning in time and geography during the first episode of Prehistoric Planet, this might just be a me issue.

Next, unfortunately when a dinosaur is discovered by paleontologists and when it lived in real life is not a very linear timeline. What I mean is, some of the dinosaurs we’ve known about for a very long time, were some of the latest to evolve, where older dinosaurs are only now being discovered. This gets compounded by the fact that Brusatte’s career is on a whole other timeline as well.

Needless to say I sometimes would get confused when the author would jump from a later part of his career to an earlier one to keep the narrative of how dinosaurs progressed in geological time in a linear fashion. I understand that this is necessary to the structure of how the book was written, however, it was sometimes hard to track.

Finally, my biggest gripe was actually how he described many individuals of the absolute legion of colleagues he’s had the opportunity to work with over his long career. The author often seems to fall into a pattern of comparing each person to a stereo type from a movie or book (often villainous) before essentially saying “But once I got to know them, they were incredible human individuals which I count among my greatest friends”.

It was a weird and slightly off-putting formula which made me feel like I would never want to be mentioned in one of his books. Why not just skip to all the parts you love about that person? What cool stuff they worked on, and why they’re special enough to include in your book? Seems like it’d be a good idea to lead with those things.

This strange quirk did not seem to carry over to figures from history, or paleontologists which Brusatte did not know personally although I did feel that there might still be a bit of sensationalism happening in their descriptions and introductions as well. Examples that stood out to me were any descriptions of Robert Bakker (author of Raptor Red), and the pretty much the whole section about Cope and Marsh.

In all honesty, I’m relatively new to all this, so those characters may have really been as Brusatte describes, but it just seemed a little much.

Give this One a Read?

Yes! Despite the slightly confusing timeline, awkwardly placed map references, and weird quirks surrounding characterization of real people, I would say this book is required reading for anyone attempting to get their foot in the door in terms of dinosaurs.

Brusatte balances a good mix of science and facts with personal anecdotes which engage the reader in a long and complicated history. This book is FULL of dinosaurs and all kinds of other prehistoric life and just getting to learn about such a diverse cast of characters is well worth the long page count.

Finally, I feel like The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs has served as a bit of a spark for me to dive back into researching and writing about dinosaurs in my own fiction. This book was filled with so much information and ideas, that I couldn’t help but feel inspired to record them and try to use them within my own work.

If nothing else, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs was a great way to kick off #JurassicJune and get excited about dinosaurs again!

Have any of you read this book? What were your thoughts? Was there a favorite dinosaur or animal mentioned within the text that you love? Please let me know in the comments!

See you next time.