Five Books and Docs on Dinosaurs
Some newer works to update your picture of everyone's favorite terrible lizards
At some point in our childhood, most of us will go through a dinosaur phase—a stretch of time when we become obsessed with learning all we can about the massive beasts that roamed the Earth from roughly 240 million years ago to 66 million years ago. I went through my own dinosaur phase at possibly the best time to do so: the early 1990s, when the first Jurassic Park came out and older conceptions of dinosaurs as sluggish creatures began to give way in the public consciousness to new ones of dynamic, diverse animals. Despite enormous progress in paleontology over the past three decades, popular perceptions of these terrible lizards have been frozen in amber—thanks in no small part to the box office success of the Jurassic Park film series.
Fortunately, the past decade or so has seen the release of books and documentaries that can help us update our views of dinosaurs and how we learn about them. Here are five I’ve found interesting:
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: Paleontologist Steve Brusatte’s 2019 book is probably the best single-volume popular science book available on the current state of dinosaur research. Though it’s six years old and no longer exactly on the cutting edge, it’s an easy way for casual dinosaur enthusiasts (and parents needing answers to children’s questions) to bring themselves up to speed on modern dinosaur knowledge. Brusatte’s narrative also provides an account of the evolution of paleontological fieldwork in the decades since Jurassic Park fixed a certain vision of dinosaurs in our collective imagination, delving into new discoveries from China and elsewhere in the world that had been largely before the end of the Cold War.
The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: No other dinosaur so fascinates humanity as much as Tyrannosaurus rex, the massive Cretaceous-era predator with sharp, serrated six-inch long teeth and powerful jaws but tiny forearms. As British paleontologist David Hone explains, though, T. rex is also one of the dinosaurs we know the most about—a “model organism” that’s so well-studied that it allows scientists to learn more about dinosaurs in general. Hone has also written other interesting if more academic books on dinosaurs (How Fast Did T.rex Run? and Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior) and co-hosts the monthly dinosaur podcast Terrible Lizards.
Prehistoric Planet: This David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV+ series recalls the popular BBC Planet Earth documentaries, taking viewers on a nature documentary-style survey of different regions and climates as they were tens of millions of years ago. Over the course of two seasons and ten episodes, we meet Triceratops in the forests, Pachycephalosaurs in dried-up swamps, armored dinosaurs in badlands, Nanuqosaurs in the Arctic, and, of course, T. rex in various locales. While a show like this quickly and inherently runs into the realm of speculation when it comes to dinosaur behavior, it’s still a welcome and watchable effort to bring new views of the terrible lizards into the public consciousness.
The Dinosaur Artist: Journalist Paige Williams takes readers on a fascinating journey into the ethically and legally dubious world of private fossil collection via the tale of Eric Prokopi, a Floridian fossil dealer who smuggled in a Tyrannosaurus bataar from Mongolia and received a felony conviction from the federal government. Along the way, Williams details the history of dinosaur fossil hunting in Mongolia—an effort that began in the 1920s and 1930s but fell victim to Cold War geopolitics before opening up again after the fall of the Soviet Union. She also tackles difficult questions as to how best to preserve fossils found in poor countries like Mongolia that lack the means to adequately display these natural and national treasures.
PBS documentary series NOVA and American Experience: For relatively quick and compelling explanations of recent research in paleontology and dinosaurs specifically, episodes of PBS documentary series like NOVA and American Experience are the place to go. Some of these episodes can be found streaming on the PBS app, while others require purchase from Apple TV+ or another storefront. A few of my favorites include NOVA’s recent “Dino Birds,” on the evolution of dinosaurs into modern birds, and 2017’s “Day the Dinosaurs Died,” on the particulars of the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs, as well as American Experience’s 2011 account of the nineteenth century “Bone Wars” between pioneering American paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!
Beyond David Hone’s Terrible Lizards podcast, historian and noted dinosaur aficionado Tom Holland’s co-hosted podcast The Rest Is History has an episode on the modern history of dinosaurs—from their discovery and naming in early nineteenth century England to the Bone Wars and the unearthing of T. rex to the role of dinosaurs in modern popular culture.
And because no item on dinosaurs would be complete without calls back to Jurassic Park, check out the underrated John Williams score to the 1997 sequel The Lost World—starting with the track “Malcom’s Journey.”