Customer Reviews

Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life

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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.

If you are new to dinosaurs or know very little about them, this is a good book to start with. However, if you are an amateur paleontologist like I am, this book offers very little new for you. I was hoping that Scott would give us a lot of goodies from his own personal experience. He did offer a few tidbits but the book in general was disappointing for me. However, he is still pretty young as career dinosaurologists go, so I am hoping he will blossom into a treasure-trove during the next couple of decades. In this work, the author makes an attempt at writing about all aspects of dinosaurs beyond what you normally think of as relevent to the subject. He touches on many subjects beyond his own field and got the definition of a chemical species wrong. It is the number of protons in a nucleus that makes an element, not the number of neutrons or electrons. Even my wife pounced on this mistake and her major in college was accounting.

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.
Liberation from the Lie: Cutting the Roots of Fear Once and for All

Excellent, well written book covering the web of life from a deep time perspective. Scott Sampson tells the story of dinosaur evolution, the associated earth history and web of life interactions. Most earth science jargon is clearly introduced. However, some previous reading or earth science classes would be helpful. I highly recommend this book.

Although I love both ecology and dinosaurs, I have never studied dinosaurs within an ecological and evolutionary framework. This book does that, and it opened up a whole new world for me. It pretty much covers everything of interest for the non-scientist dinosaur enthusiast, and it will not disappoint you. Even if you are only interested in ecology, you will be thrilled with the amount of information you can learn about the paleoenvironments on earth. This is the best book I have read in several years. I sincerely hope that Dr. Sampson writes an updated version in 5 years or so to update us on the latest findings.

The author attempts to briefly cover the history of life on earth while also discussing his field work and in doing so the book lacks cohesion. Scott Sampson's book might have been better if he stuck to the topics about which he has most knowledge, his field work in the Four Corners region and Madagascar. The best chapters are the Epilogue and West Side Story. The latter is on the Cretaceous Period of western North America, and is very enlightening. That and some other chapters, like the chapter on the K-T extinction, center on his own first hand knowledge and experiences in his professional work and are well worth reading. The epilogue presents a well presented plea for better education and awareness relating to climate change and the diversity of life. On the down side, the early chapters on the origins and the evolution of life contain few new insights, and tend toward being sketchy and fragmented.

His writing style leaves many loose ends, where the reader is presented with pages of alternative theories or explanations and is then left with nothing solid. Sampson does little to help to unravel the "unsolved mysteries about Morrison herbivores" (p. 225), and leaves the reader hanging with opposing statements like: "the hard evidence for sauropod gastroliths is minimal and disappearing fast.....Nevertheless, occasional sauropod skeletons do show appropriate sized cobbles within their rib cage..." (p 219). What we are supposed to make of contradictions like this is not clear. At the end of Chapter 12, Cinderellasaurus, he says simply, "In short, dinosaurs appeared, and later became entrenched, eventually interdependent..." (p 211) He frequently refers to studies on, and compares Mesozoic life with, life of large mammals on the Serengeti today, pointing out in places that there is really no close similarity as the Serengeti is dominated by grasslands, and no grass existed in the Mesozoic. When Sampson says, "The most important thing to remember about plant-eating dinosaurs is that most were really big" (p. 111) you are left wondering where the odyssey begins and ends.

Sampson presents almost nothing on recent discoveries of feathered dinosaurs, and he completely ignores the Berner Proterozoic oxygen curves discussed in more cutting edge books on evolution like Peter Wards Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere or The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History by D. J. Beerling.

Sampson's sole comments on oxygen levels the last 500 million years are on page 27, "Oxygen levels in the atmosphere stabilized at a concentration of about 21 percent", and page 215, "Dinosaurs inhabited a hot-house world with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and perhaps differing levels of oxygen as well...". His 'Goldilocks Hypothesis', that dinosaurs just had the right metabolism for whatever niche they lived in does not seem a very remarkable conclusion. In Chapter 12 he concludes, "The early evolution of dinosaurs, then, does not fit entirely well with either gradual or rapid scenarios of replacement.....By now it should be abundantly clear that we can't even begin to understand the evolution of dinosaurs without considering a host of non-dinosaur factors", page 210. This is the dead end we are left at after reaching the close of this chapter, devoted to enlightening us on the evolution of dinosaurs.

I would recommend the above books mentioned, or any book by Donald Prothero as superior in writing and content, Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters in particular.