Ok, so I just finished listening to this today (when I wrote this review, which is actually being posted months later). These are the things I remember from the audiobook. To be fair, I was listening on my commute to work, so some distraction from listening is to be expected, you know, because I was driving a vehicle.
Thing 1:
Part of what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur has to do with the hips. Dinosaurs evolved to have their hips configured in a way that the legs go down instead of out like a crocodile or a lizard. Neat.
Thing 2:
There have been 5 great extinctions in Earth’s history, and the third made it possible for the dinosaurs to come about. Neat.
Thing 3:
They know what the “first” dinosaur was (kind of) and there are arguments over what the biggest one was. There are also different methods of trying to figure out how much a dino would have weighed. Neat.
Thing 4:
There are body fossils and trace fossils. Body fossils tell us what they looked like, and trace fossils tell us how they behaved. We can determine courtship and nesting behaviours from trace fossils. And there were some dinos who laid weird eggs in weird patterns, and they think that dino probably sat on the eggs like a bird. Neat.
Thing 5:
The dinos that lived in the sea and in the air were not dinos! They were other things that I can’t remember the names of. Also, a woman (Mary Anning) made some very important discoveries in the early 1800’s along the coast of England, and she is given the respect she deserves now that she didn’t get when she was alive. (According to the Wikipedia article, she may have been the inspiration for “She sells sea shells by the sea shore, as she was very well-known, and she would prep the fossils she found and sell them.) Neat.
Thing 6:
Dinos had feathers, and feathers are really complicated. The first feathers were probably used for insulation rather than flight. Also, birds are dinos. One of the theories of how the birds survived was that since the avian (bird) dinos evolved beaks and the ability to eat seeds, that helped them limp along through the aftermath of the asteroid hit. Seeds are nutritious and will keep for a long period of time, so that may have been one of the few food sources available after everything went to pieces. Neat.
There were a lot more things in there that I just can’t remember. This was interesting, but there were a lot of times I wish I had a visual to go along with what I was hearing. And there were times I just stopped paying attention. A review isn’t actually a book report, so I didn’t feel the need to remember every detail! If people were into dinosaurs as kids (or adults) it’s a nice audiobook, with research and interviews and specialists, so even if you thought you knew a lot, you still might learn something!
This fulfills the CBR11 Bingo square of “Science!” (I have two for this square, and I can’t decide which one to count, so I’m putting both!)