Dinosaurs

"That’s because you have to put a dinosaur book in. I worked on trilobites for many years and I eventually wrote my book Trilobite on my favourite animals. Like most palaeontologists, I slightly resent the grip that dinosaurs have on the popular imagination, although I quite understand that they’re such fantastic animals that it’s not surprising. So I’ve been fighting my own campaign to try and put trilobites up there with the dinosaurs, which I’ve been singularly unsuccessful in doing. There are a thousand and one dinosaur books and more are sold in the Natural History Museum than all the rest of the books put together. Kids love dinosaurs. But this is a dinosaur book by two people that really know their dinosaurs and that’s why I chose it. It’s all about the different types of dinosaur and the way they lived. It’s clear that dinosaurs did almost everything that mammals do. There were large grazers, herbivores, carnivores and small insectivores. Any kind of ‘vore’ you like to mention was being done by the dinosaurs long before the mammals invented their own different techniques for doing it. So, one of the preconceptions that this book gets rid of – you know the old expressions: we mustn’t be dinosaurs, this company must not be a dinosaur? It’s complete nonsense. Dinosaurs were superbly well-adapted and would probably have survived and we would never have had a chance had it not been for their unfortunate, as Monty Python used to say, demise. I suppose it’s the sheer variety of the things, and now, of course, how widely known they are. They are found on almost every continent – there have even been recent reports in Antarctica. Would you be surprised to learn that dinosaurs, allegedly reptiles and supposedly cold-blooded, could live as far north as Greenland. Well, there you are then. That’s something that would indeed seem astonishing. Of course there are many, many dinosaurs that are known from just a few fragments, because that’s what you have with fossils, particularly with huge fossils, if you think about it. The larger an animal is the less likely it is that you’ll get it all preserved. Well, the climate was much warmer then and this is one of the vital facts we need to think about when we’re considering global warming now, of course. The climate is not just changing now, it has changed in the past, and is it different this time from the way it has changed in the past? I think it is. There have been times when carbon dioxide levels have been high in the past but there’s never been a time when carbon dioxide levels have been high because of burning, basically, organic carbon that had been tucked away in the geological record. Coal and oil, specifically. Well, I don’t welcome it. Nobody does."