Life On Our Planet: A New Look At Dinosaurs And Prehistoric Life That Once Roamed Our Earth, by Dr. Tom Fletcher

This book is a striking example of the way that a book can sometimes be marred by text. If this book had simply been photographs and computer-generated images about extinct life over the course of the existence of the earth, this book would have been among the most excellent books I have “read” this year. The artwork and photography in this book is simply stunning and deserves to be looked at for that reason alone. This is the sort of gorgeous volume that deserves to sit on a coffee table and attract the attention of houseguests who are able to flip through the pages of the book and appreciate the images of creation that so beautifully adorn so many of this book’s pages. If this was simply an art book that captured the images of the showrunners’ view of the natural history of the earth, it would be a wonderful book, gorgeous in the highest degree. After all, this book, as the title of the volume helpfully indicates “accompanies the landmark Netflix series.” Yet this book does have text in it, and the text of the book diminishes the enjoyment that a reader gets from the text itself, largely because the science discussed in the book is so starkly at odds with the political message that the book feels obligated to deliver regarding supposed anthropogenic climate change as a driver of a supposed mass extinction event going on right now that the authors of the book hyperbolically put in the same breath as the noted K-T or Permian-Triassic extinction events that nearly wiped out all life on earth.

This book is a bit more than 300 large and often glossy pages, and it is divided into 9 chapters. After an introduction provides the scope of the work, the book begins with a discussion of the origins of life, giving a laughable idea of the sort of views of chemical evolution that are current in the contemporary discourse (1). This is followed by a discussion of the early life at sea and how there were long periods of stasis (2). This is followed by a discussion of the invasion of the land (3), where early species sought refuge from the ferocity of the sea in a new home. This is followed by a discussion of life in the Permian (4), one of the underrated aspects of life on earth. Two chapters follow, taking up a substantial portion of the book, that involve the rise of the dinosaurs (5), as well as the period when they were removed from existence (5). This is followed by a discussion of the aftermath of the K-T asteroid event (6) as well as the existence of lifeforms that were able to handle the alternating periods of warm and heat that have followed in the present glacial and interglacial ages (7), where life advances with the heat and contracts with the cold–even if the authors find themselves a bit paranoid about global warming even if it is nowhere near the levels that we have experienced in the past. The book ends with a discussion of mankind and its role in life on earth (9), after which the book ends with an index, acknowledgements, and picture credits.

In looking at this book, it is pretty clear what sort of monsters pay the bills when it comes to the portrayal of prehistoric life. While trilobites and ammonites survived for hundreds of millions of years, at least according to the authors of this book, they do not receive the sort of lavish attention that is given to the privileged dinosaurs. The people responsible for the making of this book assume (probably correctly) that dinosaurs are the most saleable example of ancient life that they have to offer and made the bulk of this book into a celebration of dinosaur life over Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. This is hardly a criticism, since the dinosaurs are rendered beautifully, although the authors note that there is a massive divide within the community of people interested in dinosaurs about how exactly they looked given the way that dinosaur exterior appearance is so heavily up to artistic interpretation. Admittedly, this is something that is remarkably true for the book as a whole, in that the book itself is somewhat harmed by it being so much subject to interpretation on the part of authors and so little grounded in firm understanding, at least by the modest standards that are possible when dealing with archaeology. How the authors assign identity to species and how they posit so many species of certain sorts of animals as well as origins to them is immensely dodgy in the extreme, and demonstrates the need that people have to tell tales to fill in the gaps of knowledge that they have.