Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (7 May 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374135061
ISBN-13: 978-0374135065
http://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Beloved-Brontosaurus-Favorite-Dinosaurs/dp/0374135061
I have now come to the conclusion that most if not all of those Dinosaur Encyclopaedias that I got when I was a kid were outdated by the time they even got on the shelves. This is just one of the realisations I have come to after reading “My Beloved Brontosaurus” by Brian Switek.
It’s a slim volume with dazzling cover art that realises every Dino fan’s most nurtured dream, the author crouching in the benign posture, with a bouquet of lush swamp flowers in his hand, and looking up with curiosity and affection at the giant head of an appreciative Brontosaurus that is gently taking the popular palaeontologists offering with the grateful sincerity I have often seen in doting horses.
If you get the hardback edition then this touching cover folds out into a poster, that is double sided and shows the reality of the scene, as Brian looks on at a museum display in a vast grey hall, imagining the other side.
It is lightly illustrated with some quirky black and whites, and each chapter has a nice National Geographic feature piece feel to it.
You shouldn’t feel too sad about the duality of the cover though, because this is a wonderful book, and you will probably enjoy every page you turn to. The more modern history of the human race distracted me from my own Dino Mania sometime after 2005, (a subject I might well write about some time now I’ve read this), but re-caught the Mesozoic-palaeo bug (some of which you will literally encounter in these pages) sometime last year, after my latent Dinosaur interests slowly rebuilt itself.
This book therefore is excellent for those of you who lost track of our scaly (and now not so scaly) friends and want to sit down and ask “So, what’s new?”. I must say I enjoyed catching up with my old compadres and meeting some new ones, through this book. Even though I was never a fan of Brontosaurus; I am much more of an Iguanodon man, and have been before they were movie stars in Disney’s Dinosaur. My own prejudice aside this is also a great book if you want a concise overview of how our view of Dinosaurs have changed from the 80’s (and sometimes a little further back) to 2012. That’s right, buy it fast, before this book, like all those sometimes poorly illustrated discount “Big Book” of Dino’s, too becomes outdated. What else is it? It’s a real Palaeontologist talking about his job, and his own personal journey from his first encounter with the late lamented “Brontosaurus” to now, along the way, Dinosaur enthusiasts will not fail to connect with his many stories of growing up with Dino culture, and seeing how both creature and human changed and grew alongside each other as ideas and conceptions changed.
For those of us in Britain, this book, unlike the only other work of popular Palaeontology that I have ever seen in this country, (Dino Gangs), this little jaunt through time is going to have to be another dent in the mainstream book store market, as it is only available offline (that I have seen) in the US, for about $26, nevertheless I highly recommend it for those of you who now want a little bit more from your Dinos than the standard bargain, top trumps stat titles offer.
You will not regret going “On the road with old bones, new science, and our favourite Dinosaurs” (I’m just happy he mentioned Iggy a few times)
Josh.