Quarantine entry #107 - July 6

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but sometimes it also changes, through conflict or otherwise, and it seems that this is the last week of my quarantine entries. Yay! Or, well, not, if you’re actually enjoying following my blog – in which case, can you write a response for me so that I would know about this fact?.. Where were we?

Ah yes, we have finished talking about the birds of prey – all of them – for the moment. So, let us talk about something else – Dougal Dixon’s book ‘The New Dinosaurs’ instead, since the birds are dinosaurs, cough.

Why are we talking about this book? Because birds are dinosaurs, according to most accepted versions, especially in the West. In other parts of the world, such as RF, this P.O.V. is not fully accepted yet, but since the dinosaur-bird evolution is a very complex subject… this brings us to ‘The New Dinosaurs’ instead.

This speculative evolution book is the second in Mr. Dixon’s ‘After Man’ trilogy. The first is the ‘Zoology of the Future’, the second is this one, and the third is ‘Anthropology of the Future’. All three books are different, and I am not talking here about just the obvious.

Let me clarify. Leaving the ‘Anthropology of the Future’ aside, the first two books are more similar to each other than to the former, but whereas ‘Zoology of the Future’ focuses on the animals themselves and on their potential evolutions in the future, ‘The New Dinosaurs’ discusses the evolutionary processes themselves – how they work and how the environmental factors affect them. 

To wit, the pages of the ‘The New Dinosaurs’ constantly talk about and depict both taxonomic relatives that’d acquired different traits and looks, as well as complete strangers, (genealogically speaking), who look very similar to each other because of reasons, usually environmental ones. Hence, the partition of the titular subject into several zones – Africa & the Arabian Peninsula, North America, South America, Eurasia, (save for the Arabian Peninsula and the south-east), the south-east Asia, (including India), Australia, and the oceans. Each section discusses several animals, primarily dinosaurs and pterosaurs, but also marine reptiles, invertebrates, and birds & mammals, among others, and shows how they were shaped… see above. Pause.

…When put like that, ‘The New Dinosaurs’ sounds very modern, professional, and serious. Unfortunately, even by 1990, this book did not age well. Why? Because of the dinosaurs and co. Even as ‘The New Dinosaurs’ were published, their image in both the public area and among the professionals continued to change – a process that goes even now, just look at the Jurassic Park franchise, or the King Kong one. Where were we?

…Yes, the depictions of ‘The New Dinosaurs’ didn’t age well, and their names – such as Lank, Plunger, and Kloonk didn’t help. I.e., at that time – late 1980s – people still thought that the pterosaurs were bipedal rather than quadrupedal, and it shows – we got wingless moa-like pterosaurs with teeth. Facepalm. In Paleoarctic, (aka northern Eurasia) we got wingless birds that don’t have teeth, (and keep in mind that birds give up their power of flight very reluctantly, even on the islands, and for every avian that became flightless there are hordes of those who didn’t), and in New Zealand – pterosaurs.

However, it must be kept in mind that at that time paleontology itself was more backwards than it is now, (no duh, Captain Obvious), and for its’ time, ‘The New Dinosaurs’ was quite cutting edge – Dougal Dixon also brought an impressive bibliography to the table, though it is probably ignored, (some things haven’t changed with time, sadly). Anything else?

No, this is it for now. See you all soon!