Dino Developments

I've written before about short audiobooks, a few hours in length, that perfectly fill the time on a short road trip. On one such road trip (from back in the before-time, when people went places), I listened to the Audible original book A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs, by Ben Garrod. It's a non-fiction presentation of just under three hours, premised on the notion that while so many of us are fascinated with dinosaurs as a child, most age out of that phase at some point. Why this is significant is: in roughly the last 30 years or so, so many discoveries have been made about dinosaurs that a great deal of what you think you remember from your childhood is quite probably wrong.

This is a great little book about the scientific method in action. You wouldn't necessarily think that a couple of decades would make all that much of a difference in the study of creatures that have been extinct for tens of millions of years. But technology has been growing at an astonishing rate, allowing for the refuting, positing, and testing of all kinds of hypotheses about dinosaurs. It's still very much a developing field, and those developments are really quite fascinating.

Some of the revelations in here may not be entirely new to you. Perhaps you've heard that scientists have managed to pinpoint exactly where on Earth the meteor struck that ended the dinosaurs? But perhaps you haven't heard the latest evidence for exactly why certain species survived when others didn't. Perhaps you've heard the theory that dinosaurs, the immediate evolutionary predecessor to birds, actually had feathers instead of lizard scales? But perhaps you haven't heard the abundant evidence confirming this, rendering every Jurassic Park style dinosaur you conjure in your mind's eye an inaccurate fiction.

A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs manages to stuff quite a bit of knowledge into a tight little package. And if you don't happen to have a three-hour road trip on your schedule in which to give it a listen, that's alright. It's divided into distinct chapters on different topics, and consequently plays out more like a podcast mini-series than a typical audiobook. You can work your way through it in 20-30 minute chunks, letting the author-host take you on a series of interviews with the ground-breaking scientists advancing our knowledge of the creatures that capture so many of our imaginations at some point in our lives.

If anything, this leaves me wanting to do an even deeper dive on some of the revelations this book touches on. It's detailed enough to be compelling, but it's actually far from what I'd call "detailed." I give A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs a B+. If the topic holds (or ever held) any interest to you, you should check it out.