Book Reviews: Dragons, Ancient and (Almost) Modern

Under the energetic editorship of J.O. Farlow, the “Life of the Past” series from Indiana University Press has particularly become a welcome home for vertebrate paleontology. With 19 titles recently published or in the works, it is not surprising to find references to “dragons. ” But, beyond their titles and fossil vertebrate subject matter, the two books under consideration have little in common. One is a selective take on various aspects of dinosaurs, and the other is a comprehensive monograph on the enigmatic giant monitor lizard of the Australian Pleistocene, Megalania. * Indeed, these “dragons” missed any kind of opportunity for interaction by no less than 65 million years, and in most cases much longer! The disparity in approach and subject matter of these books calls for separate reviews, which follow here. Feathered Dragons is an outgrowth of the Florida Symposium on Dinosaur–Bird Evolution, held April 7–8, 2000. The symposium deservedly honored J.H. Ostrom, whose prescient insights into dinosaurs continue to have currency. The contents of this book do not precisely mirror the offerings of that Symposium. Rather, the book is a kind of dim sum, composed of subjects generally—but not exclusively—relating to birds and other dinosaurs. The book is divided into three parts: (I) Setting, (II) Osteology and Ichnology, and (III) Eggs, Nests, Feathers and Flight. None of these sections can be said to be comprehensive in its coverage. Each contains a series of papers relating to the topic at hand, save the last paper, which is not constrained by the other subject matter of Part III (more on that below). The Introduction, penned by R.T. Bakker, is an apologia to Edward Hitchcock, whose interpretation of Early Jurassic dinosaur footprints as bird tracks has historically been criticized. Bakker notes that it was the Victorian conception of dinosaurs, rather than Hitchcock’s interpretations, that was flawed. Evidently for Bakker, acceptance of the bird–dinosaur sister-group relationship opens the way to see Hitchcock as an acute and prescient interpreter of his observations, rather than as an arcane footnote in the history of our understanding of dinosaurs. Section I (Setting) contains two rather different studies: one, by D.A. Russell, on the uniqueness of the Asian ecosystem as a cradle for evolution of feathered Asian theropods; and the other, by G.J. Retallack, on acid rain as a selective killer of non-bird dinosaurs. Russell suggests that, if its dinosaur fauna is any indication, mid-Cretaceous Asia may have been as isolated in its time as Cenozoic Australia, preserving unique trophic relationships and theropod diversity. Retallack’s paper is a potpourri of previously published ideas. Arguing (contra a significant body of published literature) that acid rain in the US Western Interior was a major consequence of the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K/T) asteroid impact, he revisits the idea of Sheehan and his colleagues that selectivity in the extinction event resulted from buffering of detritus-feeders against the effects of the asteroid. Retallack concludes that Neoornithes (represented at Bug Creek, Montana by Cimolopteryx, here designated as a “shore bird”), survived, while the Hesperornithiformes, Enantiornithiformes, and Ichthyornithiformes, all restricted to the Cretaceous, did not. This, he infers, is because “the small-bodied shorebirds that are known to have survived . may have been sustained . by food chains based on plant detritus” (p. 54). What is omitted here is that we do not really know how many types of Neoornithes also became extinct at the K/T boundary.