The Complete Dinosaur

"This is a slightly more technical book. This is a desktop summary of the state of dinosaur science. I think a new edition is currently in preparation and this is a hybrid between an encyclopedia and a series of longer articles dealing with all the topics of biology and evolution. It’s an opportunity to read short essays on a particular subject that’s written for a non-specialist audience. So, for example, there are lots of individual chapters, some of them dealing with the history of dinosaur discoveries, a large number of chapters on how dinosaurs ate, how they moved around, their colouring, how we use them as museum exhibits, an introduction to all the different groups of dinosaurs, how they’re related to each other and a discussion about how they became extinct, their biology, what did they eat, how fast did they grow. There are three main hypotheses about how they became extinct, for all of which there’s good evidence and all of which probably happened. It’s a question of trying to work out which was the most important. We know that a meteorite hit at the right time and it would have had a huge impact on the atmosphere and on global temperature, so we know that. We also know there were more gradual changes to the earth’s climate happening, due to the continents splitting apart, changes in ocean currents, changes in the amount of land and sea and a general cooling. We also know that there were two massive volcanic eruptions in India towards the end of the age of dinosaurs and millions of cubic kilometres of lava that released a lot of gas. So, there were all sorts of things going on and it looks as though dinosaurs may have been declining for other reasons too before they finally became extinct, and these things all acting together performed the final coup de grace that killed off these large dinosaurs. We used to reconstruct dinosaurs in very dull colours, based on comparisons with large living animals like crocodiles, hippos and rhinos. Now we have beautiful fossils of some small meat-eating dinosaurs from China that show very clearly that at least a number of small meat-eating dinosaurs and possibly some of the bigger ones were definitely covered with feathers. So, these things are looking much more like birds and it’s possible that they were brightly coloured and using their feathers not only to keep warm but also for display. Yes. Unfortunately it’s only in a very, very small number of cases that we have direct evidence of colouring. Just within the last year they’ve found examples of ways that we can extract direct evidence of colours of feathers, so we now know that one or two particular dinosaurs were stripy white and black, and stripy ginger and black. But these are two specific dinosaurs where there’s microscopic preservation of parts of the feathers that allowed us to work out what colour they were. Unfortunately not. Although we can work out colour there’s no DNA. Sadly, it doesn’t survive in fossils beyond a few tens of thousands of years, possibly a hundred thousand years. So, although technically it may one day be possible to resurrect the mammoth, we are never going to be able to resurrect the dinosaurs. DNA just doesn’t survive that long."