A Field Trip to the Mesozoic

Traveling through time has become extremely popular. Since H.G. Wells’ famed novel, scientists have designed machines that can actually beam you into the future or into the deepness of time with the snap of a finger. Of course, destinations vary. Engineers and architects have a preference for Giza, 4,500 years ago, when the Great Pyramid was built. Resort enthusiasts might fancy the Dulce Vita of Herculaneum and its neighboring Pompeii, making sure they set the time dial to precede ad 63! Naturalists and outdoor buffs like to travel further in time, into the era of the large dinosaurs, to ponder these wonders of evolution, and the writer Henry Gee and the artist Luis Rey have provided them with a valuable asset to take along on their perilous journey. A Field Guide to Dinosaurs is indeed a boon for the dinosaur enthusiast, but its contents are still as imaginary as is this futuristic scenario. In this book, we learn about the color of dinosaurs, their techniques for hunting and defense, and their mating preferences and social structures, and in some instances the authors even venture into dinosaur genomics. Although much of what Gee and Rey tell us is speculation, they fully acknowledge their fantastical approach and they rightfully emphasize that the true world of the dinosaurs was probably far more bizarre than the portrait their book offers. The introductory 20% of A Field Guide to Dinosaurs provides a wide range of background information about how the appearance of dinosaurs could be reconstructed, a concise history of dinosaur discoveries, and a brief overview of their dynamic world, classification, and partial extinction—partial because, as Gee and Rey correctly emphasize in their