Riley Black - The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs

Riley Black's The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a remarkable book that places dinosaurs in their historical and ecological context. But it also shows how our own understanding of dinosaurs is constantly changing. As such the book is also a history of paleontology. As Black jokes in her afterword, "in the past two hundred years our favorite prehistoric creatures have stompled through our imaginations as immense lizards, leaping oddities, tail-dragging dullards and rainbow-coloured fluffballs". By placing dinosaurs in their wider ecological, social and historical context a new understand emerges. This ecological approach is important. Dinosaurs are changing, growing and developing creatures. They are, in consequence, very real.

This was brought home to me when I was lucky enough to visit the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. There a fantastic display Triceratops skulls shows how the animal heads changed through their lives. Later, adult, skulls had huge fans and horns. But also holes (fenestra as they are known) in their fans which only developed later in life. Dinosaurs, like Triceratops, grew up. Their bodies changed constantly, and as Black repeatedly points out, so likely did their behaviour.

For instance the horns or clubs of dinosaurs have usually been understood as weapons - reflecting a tendency for nature to be understood as "red in tooth and claw". While it is undoubtably true that dinosaurs hunted each other and bit each other, it is far from the only use for such features. Black shows how horns and claws are more likely to have been used for multiple purposes (as many animals do today) having roles in development, mating or fighting. It is very unlikely that given the variety of dinosaur horn arrangements, they "all evolved their horns to principally ward off predators" otherwise "there would likely be an ideal configuration for telling tyrannosaurs to back off". Instead the variety of horn arrangements suggests that "interactions between individuals of the species were a central factor in how these dinosaurs evolved".

Black shows how palentologists have had to break with older ideas to allow us to understand dinosaurs in a new way. It is hard not to conclude that some of the newer approaches to ecology that have developed in recent decades are part of this changing view of the dinosaurs. The environmental crises have changed our understanding of how human society interacts with nature, and this has led to new approaches to how we should understand the interaction between living things and their environment. Black's book feels refreshing in this regard. It moves us on from simply seeing dinosaurs as carnivorous individuals fighting over a herbivore carcass as they are often portrayed in books or on screen. Indeed, Black repeatedly encourages us to see dinosaurs within their wider context - including non-dinosaur animals. Here again the reader is encouraged to think differently:

The supposed antagonism between dinosaurs and mammals has been overplayed, and in some ways misunderstood because of a focus on competition for ecological prominence.... The emerging pictures is that competition between different forms of early mammals restricted the evolution of our ancestors, not the dinosaurs.

The competition between species may have been less important than the interactions between individuals of the same species. Here I really enjoyed (and learned a lot from) Black's discussion of the rearing of young dinosaurs, and how adults treated their eggs. Sometimes they cared for them, and sometimes they left the eggs alone and the young to fend for themselves. But whichever strategy was adopted by different dinosaur species, it had consequences for the behaviour of the young and for the wider ecology. Take young T-Rexs. Their very existence likely changed the local ecology, but also the fossil record. As Black says of the T-Rex young they took up the "distinct ecological role of the medium-size predators that we would expect to find, preventing other dinosaur species from taking it up. it's one reason that the Hell Creek Formation... sometimes seems to have lower dinosaur diversity than other habitats". 

Of course dinosaurs, like all living creatures, transformed their own environment. Black gives several examples of how they changed the landscape - creating pools through their size and weight, or ensuring that a forest would have had plenty of open space as well as woodland. The disappearance of the dinosaurs then opened up an evolutionary space where mammals could become dominant, but so could many other forms of flora and fauna. Dinosaurs were not isolated lizards. They were social creatures that changed their environment and evolved, developed and disappeared over a huge period of time. Black reminds us that the later dinosaurs could possibly have walked past fossils of their older ancestors. It is a startling reminder of how old the Earth is, and how long the time of the dinosaurs was.

Since reading one of Riley Black's earlier books The Last Days of the Dinosaurs I have enthused about it to everyone who mentions dinosaurs to me. The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a fine volume that broadens the story and places dinosaurs in a much wider context. Anyone who wants an introduction to the dinosaurs that shows how we have changed our understanding of these fabulous beasts will enjoy this book. Its an excellent, entertaining and insightful read.

Related Reviews

Black - The Last Days of the Dinosaurs
Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters
Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution
Gould - Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Mayor - The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Ward - The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared
Fortey - Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind