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I have a book reccomendation for you if you have
read Dinosaur Heresies - it's by Adrian Desmond and it's called The Hot Blooded
Dinosaurs. Although it does not give information about clades and modern
techniques etc, it does make a very good accompaniment to Bakker's book.
Also read Dynamics Of Dinosaurs and other extinct giants by R McNeill Alexander
- a thin green and yellow A5 paperback on treating dinosaurs as miracles of
engineering which of course they are. For a really good (and not too
heavy) book on the basics of cladistics, read Peter Dodson's The Horned
Dinosaurs. It is heavily focused on the ceratopsian lineage of the
dinosauria, but hey - Darwin's origin of species focused heavily on pigeons, but
the information within was (obviously) transferrable across the board.
Have fun learning,
Yours
sincerely, Samuel Barnett
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, August 13, 1999 3:32
PM
Subject: Furthering Self Study
Good day all,
I am a new member to the
list and had a few queries for the many experts that I perceive to be on this
list based on the highly technical stuff I've been thrilled with these last
few days.
1. I have always been fascinated by dinosaurs, although I
did not choose to go on to study about them in a university course. I've read
and understood most of the material from books like David Norman's Illustrated
Encyclopaedia of Dinosaurs and Robert T Bakker's highly absorbing The Dinosaur
Heresies. However, I'd like to now go just a little bit further and was
wondering, what would be a good book to go on to next? I'd like to slowly
absorb the more scientific aspects of dinosaur study on my own, but still not
have to make the leap from what I've read to something extremely dry and
technical. I'd really like to learn about stuff like pygostyles and
furculae.
2. I've had a few books that were suggested to me, but it
seems that the taxonomy is always changing and you've got all sorts of new
classifications and discoveries every year. I'd like something relatively up
to date.
3. Are there any good websites on the net from which I might
begin my self studies?
4.I've just started reading up on new
discoveries and was pretty astounded. Seems that each new discovery that is
made is based less and less on complete specimens so that we don't really know
emphatically about their anatomy, but are educated postulations and guesses
based on a remnant or bone. Is this true? Has there been any significant new
discoveries with more complete specimens?
5. Finally, I've seen
some new creatures that I thought, to my limited knowledge anyway, were pretty
new, such as amagrasaurus and giganotosaurus, but then realised that they were
pretty old discoveries. Apparently not much is told about them in the layman's
sources. I'd love to know about unusual dinosaurs such as shunosaurus, which
as I understand actually have a tail club at the end. On the other hand,
creatures that I thought were already known from way back, such as
longisquama, I found out on this list has not even been described yet. What's
with this?
Thanks a lot, guys. I'd appreciate answers or guidelines to
any of the above queries.
Greg
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