Oops and SMALL and TALL TALES

First of all – oops. Last night’s episode of “Agents” is called “Nothing Personal” and it aired on April 29, not May 5, as it is self-evident. My bad, I had a rather exciting evening.

Second, I want to talk about a book called SMALL and TALL TALES of EXTINCT ANIMALS. This is a rather interesting book, albeit published primarily for children, about extinct animals, of course. It discusses 27 species of extinct birds and mammals – the odd animal out is Lonesome George the giant Galapagos tortoise, who is a reptile instead.

The book’s design is simple: it got a prologue, a map of where the extinct animals were located before they died out, the animals’ entries, a glossary of some of the more obscure terms and...not exactly an epilogue, but a ‘frieze’ of the animals, done in black silhouettes over a more colorful background – a rarity in many books.

Let me elaborate. The animals’ entries consist on one half, of a comic that tells some sort of an ancient myth or legend, makes some sort of an anecdote, depicts just how exactly the animal in question died out and why, etc. The other half is essentially a fact-box that depicts the animal’s statistics – just how big and heavy it was, what were its’ particular features (the horny plates of Steller’s sea cow,  the giant claws of the giant ground sloth, the tail of the Glyptodont, etc). Artwork dominates the text in the book, no doubt, but the half-comic half-factbox works – it conveys enough information for its audience (especially the younger readers) for them to understand what is going on (the animal has died out and this is why) and to be, hopefully, intrigued enough to continue to read about the modern animal extinctions and perhaps later on to do something about it – join the World Wildlife Fund or something...

The book’s other features are slightly more ambiguous. The book’s map, depicting where each extinct animal lived is rather simple – it is an ecological map, not a political one, it just shows the relative ecosystems of the world – the deserts, the jungles, the mountains – and where each animal lived. It is also colored-coded – the Americas’ animals are outlined by a different color than Africa’s or Eurasia’s or Oceania’s. The book itself is divided into four parts – Americas, Africa, Eurasia, Oceania – but there is no warning, no specified separation between the parts: for example, you flip over the page with Lonesome George and without any warning you’re suddenly dealing with African extinct animals instead. It is not very clever and subtracts any possibility of any intermediate conclusions being presented in EXTINCT ANIMALS. (The final conclusion is something else and will be discussed below.)

Second, there is the glossary. It discussed such terms as biodiversity, extinction and myths & legends. True, EXTINCT ANIMALS aims at children readers, rather than the grown-ups, but by now (the book was first published in 2010, translated into English in 2012) even children probably know what biodiversity or myths & legends mean. Thus, the glossary is probably unnecessary and again, it actually subtracts from the overall value of the book. 

Finally, the frieze in question. It creates a semi-panoramic timeline view of the 27 animals described by EXTINCT ANIMALS as it was said before, and it also acts as a conclusion of sort: it shows how the described animals have died out throughout the ages, as a rule – after coming into contact with men. This frieze just emphasizes the book’s message – all of these animals died out because of human action – one last time and is a rather effective medium, especially for a younger audience.

But what about the book’s message? Were humans responsible for all of the extinctions? Perhaps unintended by the makers of EXTINCT ANIMALS – Hélène Rajcak and Damien Laverdunt – show several waves of animal extinction during the last 15 000 years or so. The oldest mammals, the so-called mega-fauna of Pleistocene (and Pliocene, by extension), from the giant echidna of Australia to the woolly mammoth of Siberia (Eurasia) died out when humans were just beginning to make their mark on the world and probably had nothing to do with the following extinctions. However, the animals that died out during the last 2 000 years – yes, they probably perished due to human actions, whether you’re talking about the Sicilian dwarf elephant and the European lion (a subspecies of the modern lion, actually) or Chinese river dolphin and Lonesome George the giant tortoise, undoubtedly. During the Pleistocene, humans were still not numerous enough to affect the world around them – but during the Holocene (a la right now) they most certainly are: the frieze shows how the extinction process speeds up from the 1700s-1800s. 

Thus, the message of EXTINCT ANIMALS implies that and suggests that humans have to clean up their act or the Chinese river dolphin and Lonesome George (who died on June 24, 2012, two years after the book was originally published by Gecko Press) will be succeeded by more mammals, birds, reptiles and other animals – a message worthy enough to be thought about and to be, possibly, prevented.

PREHISTORIC LIFE - a book review

Dorling Kindersley’s book of PREHISTORIC LIFE... what can be said about it?

Firstly, it was intended as a book for children – that is evident in wonderful, well-shot (or well-designed) illustrations: some real-life photographs, some – 3-D images, some – drawn in more traditional ways. It is evident in text, which mostly consists of a series of short sentences and/or paragraphs, designed to give maximum of information in minimum of text.

Secondly, despite the above-mentioned intent, what PREHISTORIC LIFE comes across is a multimedia site made paper: the fact boxes contain all sorts of asides that just distract the reader, and the images themselves are different and distributed unevenly: most of 3-D images concern the dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles; the photographs (and other media) concern other parts of the book. 

Thirdly, the fact boxes themselves are uneven. Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus and Euoplocephalus are the most detailed fact boxes (among the dinosaurs): the book’s writers, designers, other members of the staff team spent most of their attention there, showing various details of the skeleton. Fair enough. But the Iguanodon fact box shows only the bones of its front limb – and there is no mention of the fact that Iguanodon and Megalosaurus were the first dinosaurs to have ever been studied by scientists, which is simply wrong and incorrect.

Then we have the intended audience of the book. As it was mentioned before, the media element of PREHISTORIC LIFE aims at children, but the abundance of actual scientific facts, the size and weight of the actual book (with over 500 pages PREHISTORIC LIFE may not be heavier than an average brick, but neither it is lighter), the cost of it make PREHISTORIC LIFE a very hefty and doubtful gift for an average child: in this day and age they would rather look up the dinosaurs, the pterosaurs and the mega-mammals on the Internet rather than shift through the pages – for a lay person of a pre-teen/teen age that is boring and tedious, and an adult will find the text of this book to be rather childish and naive: “Monoplosaurus wasn’t related to Dilophosaurus”, “after Tyrannosaurus Allosaurus is the best-known theropod” – no duh! 

On their own, these factors are surpassable; combined they spell extinction for PREHISTORIC LIFE as a successful encyclopedia and promise more trouble for DK as a company.

Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators. Review.

Few days ago I have watched a DVD: “Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators”. What conclusions can be drawn from it?

Firstly, Beyond T-Rex: this program deals with the discovery of two of T-Rex’s biggest competitors: giganotosaurus and carcharodontosaurus, two closely related carnosaur cousins. As such, they were closely related to the allosaurus of the Jurassic time period, meaning that they were more primitive than the T-Rex, in some ways, mainly in regards to smarts. T-Rex itself had an IQ somewhere between the American alligator and the common house cat, and the carnosaurs were even less intelligent.

Furthermore, size for size, the carnosaurs had a weaker bite than the T-Rex’s but stronger – and larger - forearms with bigger claws to compensate this relatively weaker bite; if T-Rex and its cousins acted like modern crocodiles do, bit down hard and tore deep, gaping wounds, the carnosaurs acted more like the sharks’, inflicting shallower, but heavily bleeding wounds – hence the difference in their teeth. If the T-Rex’s teeth were ‘railroad spikes’, then the carnosaurs’ teeth were more like blades, more easily broken and which slashed rather than stabbed.

This was demonstrated in both Beyond T-Rex and Monsters Resurrected: Giant American Predator, which featured yet another carnosaur: acrocanthosaurus (acro). At 8 meters in length it was smaller than the carcharodontosaurus and giganotosaurus, but still larger than the T-Rex with much more developed forelimbs yet a slimmer, and relatively weaker, snout. That said, this weaker bite was compensated by its neck and backbone ridge that allowed acrocanthosaurus to clamp on, like a vise, onto its prey – giant sauropods like paluxysaurus, now apparently re-named into sauroposeidon. T-Rex could not do that for all of its awesomeness, if it bit down, it would bite right through, unlike the carnosaurs, which could not bite through bone.

On the other hand, at the end of the Cretaceous, when T-Rex walked the Earth, there were little to no sauropods in North America, so who knows how tyrannosaurus would have handled them overall.

Finally, there was Clash of the Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators, which focused on T-Rex, deinonychus and quetzalcoatlus. The latter, incidentally, is a pterosaur – a flying reptile, not a dinosaur. This feature showed clips of the predators hunting herbivores, including paluxysaurus/sauroposeidon, and it was done by deinonychus the raptor, (also featured in Monsters Resurrected: Giant American Predator), not tyrannosaurus.

In other words, here is how the cookie crumbled. The carnosaurs, featured in Beyond T-Rex and Monsters Resurrected: Giant American Predator had remained relatively basic, somewhat primitive creatures, only growing larger in size and specializing in feeding only on sauropods: when acrocanthosaurus, for example, had to deal with an armored dinosaur called sauropelta, it failed completely, and when the sauropods died out, so did the carnosaurs.

The tyrannosaurs and the raptors, on the other hand, were more specialized. Size for size, tyrannosaurs – especially T-Rex itself – were more stocky and robust than the carnosaurs, probably ambush hunters than long-distance chasers. Their forelimbs were smaller, especially in proportion to the rest of the body, but their heads and jaws were much larger and their bite – much stronger.

The raptors, on the other hand, had well-developed claws both on front and especially on the hind legs, but their teeth, though sharp, were small and probably relatively ineffective as killing tools, especially for smaller species such as velociraptors. (An utahraptor, easily 6 m long, was probably a somewhat different story.)  Thus they used their claws to deliver the killing blows, as Clash of the Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators demonstrated. So...

So, the DVD “Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators” demonstrated three ways that the evolution of dinosaur predators occurred. One was the basic design of the carnosaurs, similar to that of the original carnivorous dinosaurs, but blown to gigantic proportions. The second – that of the tyrannosaurs – was the increasing specialization of jaw power. And the third – that of the raptors – was the increased specialization of claws instead. Put otherwise, the carnosaurs were the biggest, the tyrannosaurs – the strongest, and the raptors – the fastest. Neat.

As for the DVD itself, it is well put together and the viewing quality is quite good. The images on the cover, admittedly, belong to none of the features mentioned inside, but that is beside the point. I rate this DVD 4.5 stars out of 5.