241 pages
Published 2013
Read from March 25 to March 29
Rating: 3 out of 5
A pretty conventional “dinosaurs aren’t like what they used to be!” pop science book, largely along the same lines as Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. While Black’s writing is in casual pop science mode here, and not trying to do anything fancy, it has a slight edge edge over Brusatte’s here’s-one-for-the-normies prose. Brontosaurus feels more informative and confident in the cognitive abilities of its audience, overall. There are chapters on dinosaur diseases and parasites, for example, rather than “here’s a whole chapter about T. rex!”
However, science often moves fast; ten years after publication, My Beloved Brontosaurus feels juuuust out of date enough to make me question if it was worth reading. The title itself, for example—a reference to how the genus Brontosaurus was subsumed into Apatosaurus, a metaphor to encapsulate the gulf between pop culture perceptions and ever-evolving dino science, the way that childhood’s kitschy dinosaurs were erased by refined understanding—was rendered obsolete in 2015, when a new study suggested that Brontosaurus was likely its own distinct, valid genus after all. (In all fairness to Black, she does mention a “rumor” of the then-ongoing study in the epilogue.)
Painless but inessential, that’s the vibe I’ll give it. And it’s about dinosaurs, so that always gets a generous rating from me.
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