WALKING ON EGGS by
Luis Chiappe & Lowell Dingus
The Astonishing Discovery of Thousands of Dinosaur Eggs in the Badlands
of Patagonia
Little, Brown - July 2001
ISBN 0316854891
Nonfiction / Paleontology
Reviewed by Rachel
A Hyde, MyShelf.Com
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a US Copy
Few things have perhaps
given so many people such enjoyment in recent years as dinosaurs. They
fulfill all our inner child's thirst for fantastic monsters but have the
added dimension of having once been very real indeed.
This is the story of
how a team of geologists and paleontologists went to Argentina back in
1997 to dig for fossils and hit the jackpot - what they found was the
largest dinosaur nesting site ever found and they were soon, as the book's
title implies, literally walking on eggs. But that was not all for they
found that inside a few of the eggs were the preserved skins of the tiny
embryonic dinosaur inside. This was a find of great importance.
But what sort of dinosaur
laid the eggs and under what type of conditions?
Cleverly appealing to
both novice and knowledgeable amateur alike the authors relate the joys
and vicissitudes of being on an expedition in a remote place, the ecstasy
of finding something so awesome and, in similar steps to police trying
to find out whodunit when faced with a body how they systematically went
about finding who laid the eggs. The short and highly readable chapters
have headings like Establishing the Cause of Death, Compiling a List of
Possible Victims (A Brief History of Dinosaurs) and What Were We Looking
For and How Did We Decide To Look which say it all.
There is an impressive
and very succinct chapter on the differences between the groups of dinosaurs
and the individuals within these groups and the whole brings the cutting
edge of paleontology into your home. Too many books of "popular science"
are too much popular and not enough science or the opposite but these
authors have done the highly enviable feat of aiming squarely for the
interested layperson and getting it spot on.
If you love dinosaurs
- and whether or not you saw the program on the Discovery Channel about
this site - this book is a must.
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