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				All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals Price: $8.99
Puts the "Gosh-wow!" in "Gosh-wow! Science.", December 7, 2012 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (Kindle Edition) Back in 1977, I heard Ray Bradbury give a lecture where he said that if he was given control of a television network for two hours, he would make one hour about dinosaurs and the other hour about Egyptian mummies, because everyone loved dinosaurs and mummies. Given the success of Jurassic Park, Bradbury was, as always, well ahead of his time. Dinosaurs fascinate. Their size and the oddness fascinate. Who hasn't wondered, what would it have been like to see these animals as they actually looked, rather than seeing their dessicated bones and the odd bits of life that an artistic imagination can breathe into their fossilized remains. Those artistic conceptions have become iconic - the T Rex roaring as muscular and sleek body chases down its prey, the herd of triceratops, their sleek bodies standing shoulder to shoulder in a defense perimeter, sauropods with their long necks extending horizontally out from their body for over a dozen meters, etc. And, yet, according to All Yesterdays, those iconic images may be wrong or misconceived or simply need to be reconsidered. New findings from paleontologists in the field are suggesting that dinosaurs may not have looked uniformly like large, sleek iguanas, but may have sported feathers and "fur." Further, the tendency of artists to treat the fossil record as an opportunity to show off their knowledge of anatomy by conceiving of dinosaurs as "stripped down" versions of what they might have been. One of the most effective parts of All Yesterdays is its conceit of imagining the reconstruction of modern animals from fossil records bereft of knowledge of the "integuements" of the actual animal. The results are amazing and humorous, with sleek and graceful cows built for speed and elephants with "nose bulbs" and highland grazing manatees and vampire humming birds. That kind of misconception delivers the message that dinosaurs may not have looked at all like what we've been trained to think they look like. And with that as the take-off point, the authors and illustrators give us puffball versions of cute polar dinosaurs, and dinosaurs so covered with feathers that their form is indistinct, and dinosaurs that look like hedgehogs, and spiny, non-sleek triceratops. We are also treated to artistic renditions of dinosaurs engaged in play and other odd behaviors that animals actually engage in when they are not running in fear from predators or engaging in predation, i.e., during most of their life. This is a thin book, around 100 pages and 60 illustrations. The reader can gobble it up in under an hour, or dip into it as the spirit moves. It is not a scholarly book for those who want the academic low-down on recent discoveries, but it does have the great virtue of scratching that itch we all have for a time machine that will let us see what dinosaurs may have been like so very long ago. Comment | Permalink

Return of the Mega-croc."

Crocodilians may have been top predator in dinsosaur ecology.

To investigate that question, Martin Lockley at the University of Colorado, Denver, and Spencer Lucas of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, turned to one of the most famous fossil phenomena on the planet—the dinosaur freeway that runs through Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and Oklahoma. This collection of tracks, scattered over several sites of the same age along the coast of an inland sea, is thought to mark an ancient migration route. The traces of more than 1,380 individual animals can be distinguished. Most, but not all, were ornithopods. Some were small carnivorous dinosaurs—the sort that might pick off young stragglers in the way that the crocodilians identified by Ms Drumheller and Mr Boyd did. But there is, Dr Lockley and Dr Lucas realised, something missing from the picture. When they looked for traces of big predatory dinosaurs, they found none.


That is ecologically absurd. Unless, of course, the top predator of the system—the one that could hunt down adult ornithopods—was not a dinosaur at all. And, when Dr Lockley and Dr Lucas re-examined the tracks they found that that was exactly what was going on. Instead of theropod footmarks, they found those of crocodilians. More than a quarter of the places where the dinosaur freeway surfaces have yielded signs of crocs. And they were big: sometimes more than four metres long. That is certainly large enough to take on an adult ornithopod.

Such megacrocs, then, could easily have acted as top predators in this ecosystem. But that does not completely explain the absence of theropod tracks. Modern migrating herbivores fall victim to many sorts of carnivore: big cats, wolves and hyenas, to name but three. The marshy conditions of the dinosaur freeway (the reason its footprints formed, and have survived) may, though, have favoured crocodilians over predators that had evolved on drier land. In that sort of environment even a big theropod would constantly have been looking over its shoulder. Perhaps the real reason why they did not plant their footprints on the dinosaur freeway is that they might have ended up as prey, as well.