Diatoms to Dinosaurs: The Size and Scale of Living Things - Hardcover

Chris McGowan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559633042 ISBN 13: 9781559633048

Publisher: Island Press / Shearwater Books, 1994

Synopsis

An exploration of size and scale in terms of the survival of living organisms analyzes a wide range of life forms, answering questions about metabolism, physiology, life expectancy, the biology of senescence, and other natural history questions. IP.

About this title

Review:

With a background in paleobiology, Christopher McGowan is adept at asking deceptively simple but actually very awkward questions of the "Well, we've dug up this fossil skeleton, now how on God's earth did it ever fly?" variety. McGowan looks at the way the scale and shape of animals relate to their behavior, diet, and life span. Why, in other words, tortoises live far longer than guinea pigs, but aren't nearly as much fun.

This line of argument leads to some seriously counterintuitive physics as McGowan explains how animals of different scales handle and exploit the physical constants by which they are bound. Discussions of drag, inertia, and viscosity are particularly well handled.

Especially refreshing and entertaining is McGowan's happy willingness to admit that millions of years of evolution are smarter than he is. Sometimes animals just make no sense at all. Consider Quetzalcoatlus, a pterosaur with a 40-foot wingspan and a long, serpentine neck. How did it get off the ground? Its neck suggests it may have been a carrion feeder. Did it climb laboriously to the peak of some vast saurian carcass and hitch a passing thermal? "This entire scenario," McGowan admits, with delicious understatement, "strikes me as fanciful."

While Diatoms to Dinosaurs is marketed very much at adults, there is an infectious enthusiasm about McGowan's writing that suggests a gifted teacher sharing sophisticated just-so stories with a spellbound class. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Chris McGowan is curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, and professor of zoology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Dinosaurs, Spitfires, and Sea Dragons.

About this edition

• Publisher: Island Press / Shearwater Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1559633042
• ISBN 13: 9781559633048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Illustrator: Julian Mulock