Book review – The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans’ Decline

7-minute read
keywords: history of science, marine biology, oceanography

The Challenger expedition has come to be remembered as the birth of oceanography. This Victorian scientific expedition saw six naturalists and over 250 crew on a 3½-year circumnavigation of the globe from late 1872 to 1876. En route, they collected sediment samples, basic measurements on the ocean such as temperature and flow rate, and dredged and trawled up large numbers of animals, many of which were new to science. The Wake of HMS Challenger is the third recent popular book on this expedition that I review here, and I admit that I went in slightly concerned. After two excellent earlier books, is there anything new left to tell?

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Book review – The Princeton Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs (3-Volume Set): Ornithischians, Sauropods, and Theropods

14-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, paleontology

When an advance copy of this large, 3-volume set arrived on January 2nd, I thought that, surely, five weeks until publication would be enough time. This is where my insistence on reading a book cover to cover before reviewing it came back to bite me. With apologies to readers and the publisher for the extended radio silence, but I needed the last 48 days to plough through this prehistoric beast. It was a worthwhile endeavour, though, as Princeton adds another excellent entry to their growing roster of palaeontology titles. This is the most comprehensive popular dinosaur encyclopaedia I have yet encountered, going all-in by describing well over 1100 species and covering mountains of primary literature. Combining a pleasingly uncluttered visual presentation with entries that strike a fine balance between the accessible and the scholarly, this is a reference I can see myself returning to regularly for a pithy overview of almost every dinosaur under the sun.

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Book review – In the Circle of Ancient Trees: Our Oldest Trees and the Stories They Tell

8-minute read
keywords: dendrochronology, trees

Six years ago, Belgian dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet blew me away with Tree Story, making it onto my year-end list with her account of research on tree rings. To be honest, I was not sure how she could top that book, and maybe she was not either. For her latest book, released autumn last year, she has thus taken on the role of editor to let her colleagues tell you first-hand of their research. In a nicely balanced collection of essays that features long-lived trees from around the globe, ten senior dendrochronologists provide ten different and sometimes personal answers to the question: “And what else can you learn from tree rings?”

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Year list – The Inquisitive Biologist’s top 5 reads of 2025

3-minute read

2025 was a year in which I managed to read and review 32 books. What follows is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful, and most thought-provoking books I read this year.

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Book review – The Desert Bones: The Paleontology and Paleoecology of Mid-Cretaceous North Africa

9-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, paleontology

Having just reviewed The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, I next wanted a more current overview of our palaeontological knowledge of North Africa. So, to conclude this impromptu trio of reviews, I turned to British palaeobiologist Jamale Ijouiher’s 2022 The Desert Bones. Offering a meticulous and exhaustive overview of the often fragmentary material found throughout this region, The Desert Bones brings to life North Africa during the Mid-Cretaceous: a time of wetlands, rudist reefs and, of course, spinosaurs.

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Book review – The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt

9-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, paleontology

Having just reviewed the recent Spinosaur Tales, there was one aspect to the history of this dinosaur that I found particularly intriguing: the discovery of Spinosaurus in Egypt in 1912, and the subsequent destruction of the fossils during an air raid in World War II. One name thus kept coming up time and again: that of German palaeontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach (Ernst Stromer for short). It is an unbelievable bit of history that has all the ingredients for a remarkable book, which, it just so happens, was written back in 2002. Given that I bought a copy of this book five years ago, this is the perfect excuse for an unplanned detour, going back to the 2000s for a joint American-Egyptian fossil hunting expedition, and even further back, to the Egypt of the 1910s.

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Book review – Spinosaur Tales: The Biology and Ecology of the Spinosaurs

9-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, evolutionary biology, paleontology

When I reviewed Witton’s King Tyrant earlier this year, I mentioned not minding if we get more books that give a detailed overview of specific dinosaur groups. Almost as if in answer to that wish, Spinosaur Tales was announced. These fish-eating and sail-backed (well, some of them) predatory dinosaurs are as enigmatic as they are controversial, and writing a book about them means navigating both fragmentary remains and strongly held opinions. So, who better to tackle this challenge than two of the best names in the business? Riffing on the title of Hone’s previous book with Bloomsbury Sigma, The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, this thoughtful book brings together palaeontologists Dave Hone and Mark P. Witton to discuss everything we do and do not know about spinosaurs.

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Book review – The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs: Unearthing the Real Behaviors of Prehistoric Animals

7-minute read
keywords: ethology, fossils, paleontology

Back in 2021, palaeontologist Dean Lomax impressed me with Locked in Time, a popular science book that looked at the behaviour of extinct animals as revealed by a selection of extraordinary fossils. Showing that there is more to be said on the topic, he now returns with The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs, which features another tranche of remarkable fossils. More than just a sequel, though, this book improves on its predecessor in several respects.

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Book review – Edgar Allan Poe: A Life

15-minute read
keywords: biography, literature

Next to an abiding interest in biology, I also have a penchant for the gothic, and a version of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe naturally can be found in my library. But beyond the author of The Raven, who was Poe? One man who can tell me is Richard Kopley, a Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the Penn State DuBois campus of Pennsylvania State University. When this biography was published back in March, I made a mental note to revisit it for Halloween. Though my background is in biology, Kopley fortunately wants to provide for a broad readership, including “the general reader, the aficionado, and the scholar”, the goal being to “get as close to Poe as I can for as many readers as I can” (p. 4). Thus, for the last 21 days, I have immersed myself in this detailed and deeply researched biography to read of a life that was both captivating and tragic.

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Book review – Lechuguilla Cave: Discoveries in a Hidden Splendor

8-minute read
keywords: caves, geology, speleology

Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico would be a dead ringer for one of the Seven Wonders of the World, if only the authors of that bucket list had known of its existence earlier. I read about this cave recently while reviewing Onstott’s Deep Life, where it was mentioned as an example of caves forming in unusual ways. While doing some more background research, I came across this book that, though published in 2022, had thus far escaped my attention. Edited by geoscientists Max Wisshak and Hazel A. Barton, it combines a mouth-watering photographic portfolio with a series of informative essays to share this cave’s spectacular beauty with the wider world.

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