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book: the rise and fall of the dinosaurs
May. 16th, 2019 04:30 pmReally good!
Read by the guy who also narrated Generation Kill, which made for a little weird of a listening experience, but he did a good job. If you're 50-50 on audio/print books, maybe get print for this one, because I bet there are PICTURES.
I definitely recommend the book for anyone who's interested in dinosaurs or biology or science. Apparently we've learned a lot since I was last into dinosaurs (elementary school).
Things I learned about dinosaurs:
- almost all of them had feathers or proto-feathery things, which were probably used as displays and/or warming fluff when they weren't capable of launching the dino into flight
- birds (avian dinosaurs) evolved before the regular dinosaurs died off, so they did co-exist for a while
- what is now Europe was islands in the Cretaceous, and the animals on the islands were subject to island dwarfism, which is when animals get smaller and smaller due to not having as many resources on the island, leading to TINY DINOSAURS, which were not named tinysaurs, but should have been
- T-rex was a fucking pack animal
- also it had different hunting styles for adolescents (sprinting) and adults (ambush); no word on whether they combined these styles in mixed groups
The book also went into detail about what happened when the asteroid hit, so if you have disaster anxiety maybe skip it. It didn't bother me too much. And it talked about why some species survived and others didn't.
Read by the guy who also narrated Generation Kill, which made for a little weird of a listening experience, but he did a good job. If you're 50-50 on audio/print books, maybe get print for this one, because I bet there are PICTURES.
I definitely recommend the book for anyone who's interested in dinosaurs or biology or science. Apparently we've learned a lot since I was last into dinosaurs (elementary school).
Things I learned about dinosaurs:
- almost all of them had feathers or proto-feathery things, which were probably used as displays and/or warming fluff when they weren't capable of launching the dino into flight
- birds (avian dinosaurs) evolved before the regular dinosaurs died off, so they did co-exist for a while
- what is now Europe was islands in the Cretaceous, and the animals on the islands were subject to island dwarfism, which is when animals get smaller and smaller due to not having as many resources on the island, leading to TINY DINOSAURS, which were not named tinysaurs, but should have been
- T-rex was a fucking pack animal
- also it had different hunting styles for adolescents (sprinting) and adults (ambush); no word on whether they combined these styles in mixed groups
The book also went into detail about what happened when the asteroid hit, so if you have disaster anxiety maybe skip it. It didn't bother me too much. And it talked about why some species survived and others didn't.
