Customer Reviews

Dynamics of Dinosaurs

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A lot of things about dinosaurs (and other extinct large animals) we will never know. And a lot of questions are out there. Questions like "Could Tyrannosaurus rex run?", "What was their top speed?", "Did sauropods hold their neck horizontally or vertically?" or "Could large quadrupedal dinosaurs rear up on their hind legs?"

This book treats the animals that these questions are about as "nothing more" than engineering projects, similar to large buildings, bridges or mechanical machines.

Using realistic values for things like compressability and tensile stress properties of substances like bones, cartilage, tendons, etc. and using laws of physics and formulas from structural engineering Alexander tries to answer some of these questions.

The results are very interesting. If you're interesting in dinosaurs and how they really could have been in real life, this is a book you should not miss.

Yes, a revelation it was to me, and I realize that that may say more about my (former) ignorance of the subject than about this adorable little book, whose virtues include clean, simple, British prose. I never thought that so much profit and insight could be gotten by applying physics to animals. That the physics illuminates the animals will come as no surprise; that the illumination redounds upon the physics, however, came as a pleasant one.

This is one of the more powerful little books in science. The author elegantly describes such issues as how we can infer speed from footprints, a practical discussion of whether some dinosaurs were warm blooded, and other interesting topics. Most dinosaur books are either glorified picture books or narrative. This is a practical step by step discovery of "how we know what we know". This, and Random Walks in Biology, are the two best books of this type anywhere. As a biology teacher I've gotten a ton of good ideas and lessons out of this one.

This book provides an excellent overview of the topic of how biomechanics can be applied to the behavior of extinct animals. It provides verbal examples of how to take the pieces that we have - skeletons, trackways, and other evidence, and from them be able to derive additional information about how the animal functioned. The book does not go into any detail on how this is actually carried out, there are no 'example problems' showing how to apply the physics, engineering, and mathematical methods to the problem. As such, it introduces the subject, but falls short of providing the information needed to apply what it describes. Use this book as an introduction to the study of extinct animals, but use another book to learn about how to actually apply the techniques.

Though some of the aspects of biomechanics and scaling that are addressed in this are somewhat simplified, I still find this to be an illuminating book. My father (an engineer) got this for me when it came out (I was 12) and it took me some years to get through it and understand what it was all about. I would certainly suggest it as an introduction to many of the issues modern functional morphology in vertebrate paleontology deals with. It is full of clever but simple ways tofigure things out, who can resist that?