Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life

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.

Dinosaurs have been popular since the day they were discovered. Children everywhere obsess with them, rattling off their tongue twisting names with ease. Some of those children grow up to be paleontologist who are still obsessed with the "Terrible Lizards" and even write books about them. I'm so glad they do! Scott Sampson's engrossing book takes you on a journey back back to the Mesozoic for a close look at the Dinosaurs and the world they lived in. Look around you at the plants and animals that live in today's world, they are all part of a complex web of interdependent organisms, from bacteria to blue whales, each sharing a common thread---DNA. Life in the Age of Reptiles was no different. Sampson covers a multitude of subjects; plants, birds and mammals, just to name a few. I found the chapter on Ceratopsian evolution to be particularly interesting. But the main theme of the book is the ecology of the dinosaur's world, the little things that live in the soil, on plants and animals and in the air. For the most part these little things leave little or no fossil record so their existence is somewhat theoretical, but they were there and their effect on the environment was staggering. Also examined is the geology and climate of this long gone world. In the end I was more than satisfied with Sampson's effort and rate this book right up there with Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies. Incidentally, the color plates came across beautifully on both the Kindle (black and white) and the I-Pad (color). I had no technical problems with this Kindle edition.LastRanger

Usually those of us who are not paleontologists but still find the subject interesting end up with large book filled with fantastic pictures of all sorts of dinosaurs. The Information in those books are then very general with some timescales and a discussion on why dinosaurs went extinct.This book is so much more. Mr Sampson takes a grip on all the aspects of our planet during the era of the dinosaurs and put it all into a perspective. This pedagogic method to explain and educate works very well. You learn things about the period that have a far larger impact on the history of dinosaurs than just describing each one of them in great detail. Having read a number of books on this subject I have to admit that this one is far superior to most of them. Read this book and become educated!What this book is not is a coffee table book with large beautiful pictures of dinosaurs. There are illustrations but they are not up to the standard of the text. Since the text is so superior this is a minor problem.The only thing about this book that I would like to criticize has probably nothing to do with the author. This is a heavy book with wide pages and far to small font size for the text. This reduces reading speed and actually makes reading a little tiresome. The Publisher should have considered that and put in more pages instead and with larger font size text.But, this is a great book that you will be very happy you read and proud to own.

The book is an oddity of sorts: it is aimed at adults with an interest in dinosaurs but no significant background knowledge on the subject. This can be both an asset and a fault as we will see.The author avoids the usual structuring of books dealing with the whole of the dinosaurs' story, namely the strict chronological periods / species within each period one. Instead he opts for a more generalist view in the "background building" section of the book, addressing topics such as solar system creation, tectonic plates movements, the ecology-evolution continuum within the story of Earth and all life on it, energy transfer in food webs, past and present and so on.The point of providing all this data is to better set the stage for the dinosaur family and their astonishing 160 million years dominance of land life on the planet. Besides a brief, but fairly complete, exposition of the comings and goings of various dinosaur groups through space and time, the tale is told from an ecological standpoint, with separate chapters for herbivores, carnivores, decomposers etc. A host of thorny paleontology issues are meticulously presented, with painstaking effort to objectively put forward all the conflicting viewpoints, no easy task when dealing with deep time. The discussion on alternate solutions for dinosaur physiology and thermodynamics was particularly interesting. Armed with all this, the reader then follows three prehistoric ecosystems "case studies", one for each period of the Mesozoic, coming to the inevitable extinction event and the scientific battles raging around the "why" and "how" of the dinosaurs' demise.If one has been reading about the subject for some time, many of the book's material - particularly in the "background building" section - will be redundant, but not boring, due to the author's lucid and attractive writing style. Any educated layman can easily follow the scientific arguments presented and the glossary at the book's end is of great help. Personally, I would have liked less background information and more thorny issues discussion, but you cannot have it all. And "Dinosaur Odyssey" offers a lot for dinosaur lovers, beginners and veterans alike.

Okay folks, let's get away from the computer generated fantasy 'Jurassic Park', galloping, tiger stripe dinosaur imagery and get back to basics. Let's talk Mesozoic ecosytems, vertebrate physiology, food chains, etc. That's right, how dinosaurs actually lived as animals, suffering disease, predation, participating in sexual display, suffering environmental stress, acting as primary consumers (herbivores) and secondary consumers (predators) alongside a myriad of various other life forms in the mesozoic, from the billions of bacteria in every gram of soil to the dung beetles which fed on dinosaur dung.I enjoyed this book, it moves away from 'let's dumb dinosaurs down' approach to put a more realisitic face to these fascinating archosaurs, resulting in an absolutely fascinating read. The border line is drawn, let's make hypotheses and support them with hard science, rather than just suggesting and wishing.As they say, 'it's amazing how little we know, but how much we DO know' - such is the knowledge we have of dinosaurs which is clearly explained in this great book. Can't recommend it enough to anyone who has an interest in dinosaurs. Enjoy.

This is pretty much the definitive guide to dinosaurs and how they fit into the complexity of the Earth's flora and fauna. It is exhaustive and all the layman (and keen amateur paleontologist) needs to be brought up to speed with modern theories of how dinosaurs lived and interacted with their ecosystems. It's accessible to the layman/woman, and still challenging to people like myself who have been largely unaware of the sweeping changes how the experts perceive the way prehistoric animals lived.Highly recommended by myself and my 5-year old son William.

Scientific subjects can be presented in a dry factual way that may work wonders - compared to a sleeping pill. Science is life and should bepresented in a lively, interesting and captivating way, What Dr. Sampson has achieved here is exactly that! Step into this book, take off andyou wont let go. The only disappointment is the end - I mean that it actually comes to an end. And then you wish there'd be more of this todelve into. Good luck searching!