“Dinosaurs aren’t just monsters or dragons these were real animals, in the scheme of things quite closely related to us, and making that connection is a great thing,” he writes.
In Brusatte’s worldview, on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old and welcomed vertebrates only around half a billion years ago, dinosaurs are almost our brothers, fellow vertebrates, with teeth and skin and bones. After all, it’s in Genesis that God made “every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind” and “saw that it was good.” Brusatte is Catholic, and it’s hard not to read the vivid descriptions of dinosaurs patrolling the place where we live now as a scientist’s ode to creation. What a world, I thought over and over again reading this book.
Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, is a scientist who can write in plain English and communicates why, without explicitly saying so, dinosaurs should be part of any religious or reverent worldview.Īrmed with enthusiasm, command of his material and a knack for analogy, Brusatte has written a book that incarnates dinosaurs with color, sound and fury. That’s why I was thrilled to discover Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. It’s easy to lose readers in disquisitions on the transition from the Mesozoic to the Cenozoic. The literature is largely scientific, drowning in weird names. One reason it is hard to recharge the grandeur of dinosaurs is that there are relatively few great popular science books about the subject.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
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