BOOK REVIEWS - zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSR Life offers a very encouraging sign that this nascent field is advancing and maturing with considerable speed, and that already it is beginning to deliver on many of the bold intellectual promises attributed to it. In writing such an excellent treatment, Rudolf Raff has brought us considerably closer to the many exciting and important discoveries that still lie ahead. James Hanken Tim F. Carl Dept of Environmental, Population and Organismic Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0334, USA zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA References zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Funch, P. and Kristensen, R.M.(1995) Nature X8,711-714 Valentine, J.W., Erwin, D.H.and Jablonski, D. (1996)Deu. Biol. 173,373-381 Holland, P.W.H.and Garcia-Fernandez, J. (1996) Dee. Biol. 173,382-395 Riedl, R. (1978) Order in Lioing Organisms: A Systems Analysis ofEvolution, Wiley Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Harvard University Press Halanych, K.M.(1996) Biol. Bull. 190, l-5 Graumann, P. and Marahiel, M.A. (1996) BioEssays 18,309-315 Hall, B.K.(1992) Evolutionary Deuelopmental Biology, Chapman & Hall Miiller, G.B.(1991)Am. Zoo/. 31,605-615 Wake, D.B. et al. (1991) in The Unity of Euolutionaty Biology (V’ol. 1) @udley, EC., ed.), pp. 582-588, Dioscorides Press Life and death at the KT boundary Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era by J. D. Archibald Columbia University Press, 1996. $49.50 hbk, $25.00 pbk (xviii + 237 pages) ISBN 0 231 07625 8 The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs by D.E. Fastovsky and D.B. W eishampel Cambridge University Press, 1996. $29.95 hbk (xvi + 460 pages) ISBN 0 52144496 9 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA D inosaurs are ever-popular, and there must be hundreds of books in print about these fine creatures. However, there are surprisingly few student texts, and these two books are, respectively, the first book to be published on the extinction of the dino- saurs, and the third textbook devoted solely to dinosaurs. Both of them are admirable. David Archibald has been collecting dinosaurs and other vertebrates close to the 442 0 1996, Elsevier Science Ltd Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) boundary for 20 years, and he has been involved sporadically in the long-running debate about impacts and other killing mechanisms. There are cur- rently three main explanations: (1) gradual climate and sea-level change, (2) impact, and (3) catastrophic volcanism. Archibald previ- ously favoured a model of long-term decline of the dinosaurs, and matching rise of the mammals, associated with climatic cooling and floral changes lasting l-5 million years (My). He now presents a combined model, in which many vertebrate species were stressed by marine regression, and loss of coastal habi- tats (from 60 My ago), and the impact (65 My ago), finished off the dinosaurs, pterosaurs and some other groups. Archibald focuses on his own work in the midwestern USA, where indeed the rec- ord of the last dinosaurs is the best and most-studied in the world. It is very hard, as he makes clear, to generalize from Montana to the world. The best parts of the book are those where Archibald provides clear docu- mentation of the declines and extinctions of vertebrates species-by-species. He shows (for example, page 126) that, whereas dine saurs and sharks showed 0% survival across the KT boundary, amphibians, placental mammals and champsosaurs showed 100% survival, turtles and crocodilians showed better than 75% survival, and bony fishes showed better than 50% survival at the level of species. The multituberculate mammals, marsupials and lizards were hard-hit, but not completely wiped out. This core of the book is topped and tailed with introductory sections on basic geology of the KT boundary, a history of some of the controversies, and an outline of the dramatis personae. The focus on dinosaurs is unique, since other popular texts]J are more widely focused. Archibald’s book is well written, and the computer-generated diagrams are simple and attractive. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of photographs, and the dinosaurs and other creatures are poorly illustrated with rather crude outline diagrams. Much more richly illustrated is Fastovsky and Weishampel’s dinosaur textbook. Dine saur textbooks are a new phenomenon, spurred by the success of ‘rocks for jocks’ courses in the USA,where staff in many geol- ogy departments earn their bread and but- ter by teaching huge classes of non-majors the sexy earth science subjects like ‘The his- tory of life’, ‘Volcanoes and earth hazards’ or ‘Dinosaurs’. This is not the first dinosaur textbooks84, but it is clearly more up-to-date, and it is more thoroughly researched. Fastqvsky’s and Weishampel’s book re- flects the rigour of modern palaeontological research, and it will transmit the idea of method and testing to students, especially in terms of cladistic analysis of relationships, studies of macroevolution and of functional morphology. The book also conveys enthu- siasm and excitement, two further principles of science that new generations of palaeon- tologists display in abundance. The first four chapters outline the meth- ods of dinosaur collecting, taphonomy, stratigraphy, earth history, cladistics and the evolution of vertebrates. A chapter on the origin of the dinosaurs outlines some- thing of the history of concepts of Dino- sauria, and this is a good object lesson in the role of cladistics. Up to 1980, most dinosaur experts, when asked either ‘what is a dino- saur?’ or ‘how did dinosaurs evolve?’ would shuffle their feet, or launch into a disqui- sition on the rampancy of convergence and polyphyly. The standard view was that dine saurs had had several points of origin among Triassic archosaurs, and that the term ‘dino- saur’ was a convenient label for a rag-bag of large terrestrial Mesozoic archosaurs. Clad- ists then catalogued the numerous shared features of all dinosaurs, especially related to their upright posture, which entails major modifications to the ankle, knee and hip joints. These characters define a clade Dino- sauria. Fastovsky and Weishampel argue that the dinosaurs achieved their initial suc- cess by taking advantage of an extinction event some 2225 My ago. The core of the book, pages 107-321, is devoted to a treatment of dinosaurs group- by-group. Each chapter includes a wealth of information, following a pattern of summa- rizing the history of collection and geographic distribution of the group, outlining the classi- fication of all valid genera, and then discuss- ing palaeobiology. This treatment means that all 300 valid dinosaurian taxa are included, and hence the book, through its index, offers a complete coverage of genera. The systematic section is developed in the form of one or more cladograms per chapter, and characters that define nodes are listed in the captions. Hence, in all, the cladograms could be strung together to give a cladogram of all dinosaurs, which is some achievement by the authors. The final three chapters of the book cover the warm-bloodedness debate, dinosaur dis- tributions in space and time, and the KT extinc- tion event. The dinosaur thermoregulation debate has resurfaced again recently in the literature, with new debates about polar dine saurs, stable isotope measurements in bone, nasal turbinates, and dinosaurian DNA. The authors opt for a consensus view that the large dinosaurs were inertial homeotherms, and the small theropods might have been endotherms. In their discussion of the KT event, Fastovsky and Weishampel present a good up-to-date account, full of censuses of the last dinosaurs, iridium spikes, asteroid impact in Mexico, and the like. They accept the importance of the impact, the likelihood that dinosaurs, and other organisms, disap peared rapidly and the probability of a link. The presentation of the book is superb. The writing style is lively, and there are many TREE vol. II, RO. IO October 1996