Book Review #2

Alright so I know I promised more book reviews earlier on but life got in the way and now school is starting to again as well but I finally finished another book. This time the book is Dinosaurs of the East Coast by David B. Weishampel and Luther Young, I know I promised to review Your Inner Fish next but this one seems smaller and like it would be a quick read before I started. But anyway before I get to the review here is what the cover says:

"The great dinosaur bone beds of the American and Canadian West are world famous and have yielded spectacular fossil finds. But the eastern United States and maritime Canada, where dinosaurs also roamed in great numbers, have been equally important to the study of these extraordinary creatures.

In Dinosaurs of the East Coast David Weishampel and Luther Young restore East Coast dinosaursto their rightful place on the paleontological map. They describe such dinosaurs as the plant-eating Astrodon johnstoni, similar to the Brachiosaurs, which browsed in the tropical Maryland jungle 100 million years ago. Other East Coast dinosaurs included a distant relative of Astrodon, Anchisaurus polyzelus, which lived in New England some 200 million years ago. And the remains of Hadrosaurus foulkii, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived in New Jersey some 70 million years ago, represented North America's first well-preserved dinosaur skeleton.

The authors also show that dinosaur fossil-hunting has not only had a long history along the Atlantic coast but also is very much alive there today. Some dinosaur fossils have come from the bog iron and clay pits of Maryland and New Jersey, while others have been discovered in the riverbanks of North and South Carolina. Dinosaur footprint sites have been found from central Virginia to the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.

Richly illustrated with more than one hundred photographs and drawings, Dinosaurs of the East Coast combines science, history, and modern reporting to offer a new look at an always fascinating subject.

Alright on to my review.

Overall I thought this book was an interesting read. But I will say this is not beach reading there is a lot of scientific data and information but it is presented in such a way that anyone who has at least some high school education should be able to understand it. If you have studied a lot about dinosaurs you may not be interested in about half the book which deals with the basics of dinosaur types, and evolution, and the controversies currently being studied in dinosaur paleontology. Another problem I had was that the book seems to spend a lot of time focusing on western dinosaurs for a book about eastern dinosaurs.

If it is your first time sitting down and reading about dinosaurs you should find all of the introductory information very helpful. It is also nice that they refer back multiple times to the chapter in which they talk about something for the first time so if you forget what they are talking about you just have to refer back, trust me I had to do this a couple of times. I learned a lot of information that I did not know or did not remember about east coast dinosaurs. I did not know about all of the sites that they talk about and they smartly do not give away specific locations. There are plenty of pictures especially of the people who are currently doing the research.

All in all this is a well written introduction to east coast dinosaurs, with all their sources cited if you want more information, that plays a great homage to the people who have done the research, are doing the research now, or will do it in the future. While this is not a book for everyone, I recommend this to anyone living on the east coast who has any interest in dinosaurs or to anyone who has any interest in dinosaurs in general.

Book Citation:
Weishampel, David B. and Luther Young. Dinosaurs of the East Coast. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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