Customer Reviews

Mesozoic Vertebrate Life:

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The title is misleading. If you're looking for information on pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, or Mesozoic crocs, this book probably isn't for you. However, if you want to get the skinny on Tyrannosaurus arm movement and what they were used for (yeah, amazing, eh?), new dinosaurs, and generally good information on dinosaurs, this is a good book to consider. Heavy on the second half of the Mesozoic, the book none the less manages to have a good variety of papers about various aspects of dinosaurian paleobiology, phylogeny, and behavior. A great volume.

Mesozoic Vertebrate Life Edited By Darren H. Tanke and Kenneth Carpenter with Michael W. Skrepnick as the art editor is a new research inspired by the paleontology of Philip J. Currie is an excellent book... a book for the advanced dinosaur enthusiast. This book goes into detail about Theropods, Sauropods, Ornithischians, Dinosaurian Faunas, Paleopathologies, Ichnology, and Dinosaurs and Human History.

This book has a whole host of contributors(46 to be exact). All of the men and women are tops in their respective fields, so this book is like reading a medical book with all of the resplendent medical terms. Ah, but doen't give up, there are some very excellent drawings that help explain what the author is talking about, so your not left in the dust choking on the dust. I've noticed that the best dinosaur book on detail are written in this style where a collaboration of many authors that are expert and on the cutting edge with break throughs are written this way.

I would say this, the fossil record is telling the finder something... the finder has to study what he has found and make a determination and conclusion as to what he has found. All of this takes education, trial and error, and luck. So, you have the best guesses written here... things may stay as they were presented or they may change with insight, only time will tell.

If you are more than just a casual dinosaur devotee, than this is the book for you. It is light on the early Mesozoic, but it makes up for it in the late Mesozoic. The book is mainly composed of North American Mesozoic, but there is representation in China, and South America included.

There are excellent references included with there abstracts. This s not a book for children, this is an advanced case study of the dinosaura of the Mesozoic time. Those wishing for a book that compares jaws and endocarnial anatomy will relish this book. There is even an abstract on "The Impact of Sedimentology on Vertebrate Track Studies" which I found fascinating. I didn't know they went to that much detail, in models of track formation show clearly that the layer upon which the foot descends retains the most information of the impactor. Stresses are distributed radially away from the impact site and decrease exponentially with distance.

If you want detail this book has it. There are seven sections as I mentioned above, and they are divided into 33 chapters. This took a while to read and digest the information. This would make an interesting additions to a home library.

Despite the deceptively simple title, this book only covers dinosaurs (although there is a mention of mammal tracks in the chapters on ichnology). Further, the 33 individual papers (except for the last one on Dinosaurs in Fiction) are for advanced students and professionals. It would behoove you to have already read A.S. Romer's Osteology of the Reptiles and The Vertebrate Body as well as E.H. Colbert's Evolution of the Vertebrates and Michael Benton's Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution before embarking on this book.
Still, if you already have the equivalent of a good undergraduate grounding in the field of paleontology, you will find this book a fascinating read. Well worth the money as long as you know what you're getting.