Why Dinosaurs Matter, by Kenneth Lacovara
This is the sort of book that delivers more or less what I expected from it, which is to say that while the book certainly did not meet my own standards for excellence or demonstrate either a correct view of science or a restrained view of defective climate models, and it manages to show an arrogant tendency to display evolutionary cladistic just-so stories as well as fairly stereotypical climate change fearmongering. For many readers, this is a book that they will wholeheartedly enjoy. For me, there were a variety of agendas with this book, and most of them were simply not something that I could support, wholeheartedly or otherwise. That is not to say that this book is entirely worthless, even if it is nearly so. There was at least one agenda that this book’s author has that I can support, namely the agenda of not seeing the dinosaurs as being obsolete or too rigid in their approach to survive, but rather the victim of circumstances beyond their control, given that dinosaur is often used as a synonym for that which is obsolete and vestigial and soon to be extinct [1]. Even so, that agreement only saves this book from a particularly harsh view, rather than redeeming it altogether.
This short volume of a bit more than 150 pages is divided into twelve chapters. First, the author seeks to defend dinosaurs (1), after which he makes the claim that since birds are dinosaurs that dinosaurs still live (2), and then he decides to spend some time talking about cladistics as a walking museum of natural history (3), defending the fossil record as evidence for evolution (4), and looks at deep time (5). After this the author discusses the history of geology (6), how we are to make sense of monsters (7), and then looks at the Tyrannosaurus rex (8) as well as birds (9) to show the trade-offs that happen when it comes to arm and jaw strength as well as how birds continue the dinosaur variety and power. Finally, the author concludes with some chapters featuring his own dinosaur research in Patagonia (10), looks at the dinosaur apocalypse (11) and ends with a climate change panic (12). The book then contains some acknowledgements (not that anyone should want to be acknowledged in dreck like this) as well as some endnotes. And with that the author, in a book somewhat full of photos, has stated his case for why dinosaurs matter.
Is it a case worth listening to, though? The author makes all kind of assumptions that make his case a lot more weak. Even as someone who is deeply fond of dinosaurs, there is a lot in this book that does not ring true, as it appears that lots of authors feel it necessary to try to defend their own credibility by attacking scripture and then replacing it with bogus views about the ability of minor changes to accumulate into massive ones, and for geographical isolation itself to be sufficient to create entirely different kinds. Cladistic claims of origin are themselves highly bogus, and the author views his own particular worldview as obvious truth when it is far from the fact. Perhaps the author would be better served if he realized that dinosaurs matter to people who do not share his faith in either bad arguments by analogy (the conflation between deviation within kind and macroevolutionary requirements for saltational changes that are nowhere seen in the fossil record) or bad models (like the models that are at the basis of so much contemporary panic over climate change). Dinosaurs matter, but this isn’t the book to tell you how or why.
[1] See, for example:
Edge Induced Cohesion 