Customer Reviews

Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds written by Gregory S. Paul is a well detailed book on comparetive anatomy between bird and dinosaurs.

The author is a well known evolutionary scientist and dinosaur illustrator and he has some interesting things to tell about in this book. For instance, the ancestor-descendant relationship of to birds and dinosaurs, most of the conventional thinking is that dinosaurs evolved into birds, but the author believes that on occasion the rolls could be reversed. That there may be many dinosaurs that were the secondarily flightless descendants of creatures we would think as birds.

This is contraversial, but the author makes his point with in-depth analyses of bird and theropod phylogenetics. There are many line-drawings that do a comparetive analysis, wing dimensions, avian/dinosaurian metabolics... this book has very detailed information. But, the book is written so that the layperson with a little scientific knowledge will unterstand the author intent.

This book has stunning illustrations throughout and well detailed bibliography making the information found in this book believable. There is a detail appendix toward the back of the book that covers in detail things of import for the book.

If you are one of the people who has an interest in avian/dinosaurian link this is a must purchase. This is an excellent book as it combines a large amount of technical data with drawings and related bird origins, including the energetics of the origin of avian flight. But, even with this detail, it is highly readable.

First of all this book is 436 pages. The cover is a painting of Sinornithosaurus I believe. The only reason I took off a perfect five star rating is the lack of pictures. Let's face it, who doesn't check out Greg's pictures first? There are illustrations (all line drawings, no color) but they do not cover enough pterosaurs. The only Pteranodons are skeletal drawings, and there are no Quetzalcoatlus life drawings. There are life restorations of Anhanguera and Pterodaustro. There are pictures of lots of fossil birds and a new skeletal drawing of Bambiraptor and of Deinonychus with the re-evaluated skull that is more like what Ostrom described in 1969. Disappointed to see no new life restoration of it. There are some of the old drawings (Oviraptor, Archaeopteryx, Elaphrosaurus, etc). Don;t expect this textbook to show up on ebay or even at your local stores. Get it if you're a completist or a dino technician or not convinced that birds are related to dinos.