My Beloved Brontosaurus:  On The Road With Old Bones, New Science, And Our Favorite Dinosaurs, by Brian Switek

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.  Like many children, I grew up watching The Land Before Time (at least the first film and maybe a couple of its sequels), visualizing what sort of dinosaurs I found the coolest and that most resembled my personality, and even had dinosaur themed bedsheets long after the time such things could be considered cool.  Ideally, a book like this should be in my wheelhouse.  If an author was talking about dinosaurs and had a clue about how to appeal to those who love dinosaurs, then a book like this should be great, especially when he talks about his own youth and the question of dinosaur identity and how science has shifted regarding different aspects of dinosaurs.  Unfortunately, the author wants to pound into the head of the reader that dinosaurs are somehow “icons of evolution,” making what should be an enjoyable and personal book a propaganda effort on behalf of the church of evolution, a church who my feelings are rather negative towards.  And that makes this book much worse as a result.  By trying to do too much the author forgets to do what is best, talk about the dinosaurs and shut about about what one doesn’t know much about, like logic or charm or good sense.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 200 pages and starts with the author writing about his own dinosaur life before looking at early dinosaur history and their importance in the public (1), as well as the secret of dinosaur success (2).  The author talks about dinosaur mating (3) as well as the change of views of dinosaurs regarding feathers (4).  The author talks a lot about sauropods (5) and also discusses dinosaur society (6), trying to understand the relative frequency of dinosaurs in different locations.  The author spends more time talking about dino feathers (7) while also looking at some questions about hadrosaur harmonics and the debate over Tyrannosaur eating habits (8).  The author looks at insights gained from looking at the bones of dinosaurs, including evidence that dinosaurs were a lot like birds (9).   Finally, the author looks at the demise of the dinosaurs and the controversy faced by those who first argued that the dinosaurs perished via a meteor strike and a reprise of the author’s love for the brontosaurus amid hopes that the dinosaur will make a comeback.

A book like this leads me to make some sort of recommendation to the author, and that recommendation is a simple one.  If you love dinosaurs and want to make a book about your love for dinosaurs, then by all means go out and do it.  But there is no need to layer your love of dinosaurs, something that would unite you with a large population of readers, with a sense of contempt for rival scientific worldviews, which this book does over and over again.  Fortunately, there is enough material here about dinosaurs to appreciate that it is possible to overlook the author’s terrible logic in trying to defend evolution and make fun of young earth creationism as if he was doing something original or necessary.  (It should also be noted as an aside that the author appears to really misunderstand the nature of disagreement with evolution.)  Advice from the reader for this author and the many who think like he does may be unwanted, but it’s worth giving anyway–if you want to celebrate dinosaurs with those who are fans of the dearly departed reptiles, there are many better ways to do that than to indulge in one’s spleen while simultaneously trying to take a nostalgic journey into one’s youth.  This book would have been far better had it been given a splenectomy.