There must be a limit to the number of popular books that can be written
on dinosaurs and, judging by the current deluge of titles, publishers seem
determined to reach it. Dorling Kindersley’s Great Dinosaur Atlas will help
to narrow the small remaining gap.

The reader is taken around the Mesozoic world in (almost) 80 pages,
stopping off at each continent to be introduced to the local dinosaurs.
There are excursions to world-renowned localities such as Dinosaur Provincial
Park in Alberta, and in-depth studies of particular dinosaurs, including
the multi-horned Triceratops, the chicken-sized Compsognathus and a new
British dinosaur Baryonyx, supposedly a fish-eater with crocodile-like jaws
and huge, hooked claws on the forelimbs. Alternatively, Baryonyx might have
used these tools to disembowel dinosaur carcases, though this is not mentioned
here. Marine reptiles and pterosaurs are also covered and, predictably,
the atlas finishes with dinosaur extinction.

This is a large-format work and a considerable amount of information,
usually in the form of heavily annotated illustrations, is fitted onto the
double-page spreads. Anatomy and ecology are the focus of attention, while
coverage of phylo-geny and evolutionary history is minimal. The Great Dinosaur
Atlas is reasonably up-to-date and well-researched, unlike some popular
works, but a few errors have crept in. The two reconstructions of Oviraptor
sport different heads, though I suppose this might be put down to variation
between species.

The atlas format works quite well since, fortunately, most continents
now have a respectable dinosaur fauna. Even Antarctica has recently yielded
remains of an ankylosaur and a hypsilophodontid. The disadvantage is that
dinosaurs from different ages are often lumped together on one page, giving
the rather misleading impression that they all lived at the same time.

The illustrations are of a good standard, though not very detailed.
Dinomaniacs can have fun trying to identify the various sources of inspiration.
The lack of a glossary and information on further reading are regrettable
omissions, but overall this is a cut above most popular works and reasonably
inexpensive. If you are a schoolteacher trying to devise class projects,
or an embattled parent wondering what to get the little monster for Christmas,
you could do a lot worse than buy this book.

David M. Unwin is a palaeontologist at the University of Reading.

PALAEONTOLOGY has managed to ditch its ill deserved stamp-collecting
imagein recent years and make atriumphant return to, as JohnMaynard Smith
puts it, the hightable of evolutionary studies, aposition it held earlier
this cent-ury before sexier numbers such as genetics and molecular biology
deposed it. It owes its recent success to two factors; cladistics and the
study of extinction, which is rather ironic, since palaeontologists gave
both topics a fairly cool reception.

Apart from revitalising palaeontology, these studies share another important
feature; at a fundamental level they are concerned with the detection of
patterns, rather than processes. Evolution and the Fossil Record clearly
reflects this. While itaddresses some aspects of evolutionary mechanics,
it is largely concerned with patterns of relationships and diversity and
what they tell us about the actual path of evolution. Allen and Briggs set
themselves a difficult task in providing a review ofevolution as reflected
by thefossil record that would be auth-oritative and current, and so ofinterest
to other palaeontol-ogists, but also accessible to students and those in
related fields.

The 10 chapters, written by 11 contributors, select rather than cover
the whole field. They range from Premetazoan life to creationism. The book
opens with the evolution of the Universe, a dense wodge of a chapter requiring
much perseverance and visits to the dictionary for those without astronomical
background. The next offering, ‘Catastrophes in the History of Life’, is
at the wrong end of the book but, nevertheless, provides a readable and
reasonably up-to-date account. It airs all the usual topics: scale of extinctions,
periodicity and so on. The chapter concludes with the interesting suggestion
that mass extinctions were not all bad, as they may have reset the clock,
maintaining ecological diversity on a geological timescale.

Next comes Premetazoan life, a newcomer to palaeontology, as most of
its long and complex Precambrian history has come to light only in the past
40 years. Unfortunately, a dense pall of technical terms obscures the message.
The treatment of the major radiation of life at the base of the Cambrian
is far more illuminating. This mega-event appears to have been unique in
many respects. It seems to represent the replacement of an old marine ecosystem
by a more competitive ecology that ischaracterised by many different classes
of organisms that preyed on each other. Arguably, the best contribution
comes from Paul on invertebrates. He makes the important point that researchers
cannot logically reject palaeontological evidence on the basis of that old
excuse, the incompleteness of the fossil record. After all, we take astronomic
data and explanations based on them seriously, despite our limited knowledge
of the Universe.

Edwards and Selden discuss the invasion of land, a process that began
in the Silurian, which has taken a variety of pathways and is still going
on today. Crane’s chapter on fossil plants provides an excellent example
of the impact of cladistics on palaeontology. Cladograms provide the foundation
for evolutionary trees, upon which we graft evolutionary scenarios, usually
the least rigorous but most enjoyable part of the exercise. Rayner presents
a lucid account of the origin of vertebrate flight, stressing the importance
of phylogeny in investigations of the evolution of flight mechanisms. He
concludes with some very convincing arguments that flight begins with gliding.

Benton provides a neat account of vertebrate evolution and a useful
introduction tostudies of extinction. He emphasises the progress that has
been made through more rigorous identification of monophyletic groups, rather
than the discovery of new fossils. The final chapter on creationism has
two conclusions of note. The teaching of creation ‘science’, unsurprisingly,
converts few to its cause, but more worryingly appears to reduce the ability
of students to think clearly and critically – useful only if they are considering
a career in creation science.

The book is quite well produced (though print quality isa little variable
and one diagram is inverted), but not so well organised. There is excessive
duplication – it covers the methodology of cladistics twice and extinction
studies three times – and there is no glossary, essential in this type of
book. Both first and last chapters seem rather irrelevant; far better, for
example, would have been an account of the recent work on the evolution
of trilobites. Despite these criticisms, I recommend the book to those with
some background in earth or life sciences, seeking up-to-date coverage of
topics outside their own speciality. On the other hand, students and those
new to the field would be well advised to start with something a little
less technical.