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.
In
fact, Desmond's book predates Bakker's by about a decade: it was one of the
first dinosaur books to make various best-seller lists. Pretty
interesting from an historical perspective, but almost every non-history item
in there has since been superceded by the work of various paleontologists who
were either early in their professional careers as the time, or even yet to
get to grad school. Consider that the major works of Bakker, Horner,
Farlow, Dodson, Weishampel, Molnar, Padian, Gauthier, Sereno, etc., etc. had
yet to be published (or even started) when Hot Blooded Dinos came
out!
Indeed, most of the "new wave" of dinosaur workers,
those who were finishing up grad school in the late 1980s and early 1990s
(people like me or Witmer or Forster or Erickson or Fiorillo or Varricchio and
so on) weren't even in college yet when it was
published...
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
Another recommendation, if it hasn't been made yet:
Lowell Dingus & Timothy Rowe's The Mistaken Extinction (a great
introduction to extinction theory, cladistics, and bird
origins).
And
of course Farlow & Brett-Surman (eds.) The Complete Dinosaur, now in
paperback! (Speaking of which, back to work...)
Thomas R. Holtz,
Jr.
Vertebrate
Paleontologist
Department of Geology
Director, Earth, Life & Time
Program
University of Maryland
College Park
Scholars
College Park, MD
20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/pages/faculty/HOLTZ/holtz.html
http://www.inform.umd.edu/SCHOLAR/programs/elt.html
Phone:
301-405-4084
Email: tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):
301-314-9661