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He almost humanizes them, and certainly humanizes his fellow paleontologists by writing chattily about colleagues. Wilson did for ants and Carl Sagan for stars, making them more accessible and appealing. In “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Dylan Thomas remembers the gift of a book “that told me everything about the wasp except why.” “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs” tells the who, what, when, where and how, all of which might add up to the why. Proto-dinosaurs had primitive stubbly feathers proper dinos had better ones birds developed the best feathers with aerodynamic shapes to enhance flight. Today’s fliers inherited anatomical features from their ancestors - “hinge-like” toe joints that cannot twist, bones made lighter and stronger by air sacs, superior breathing apparatus, feathers. As Latin survives in the living languages of French, Spanish and Italian, dinosaurs are with us still - some of them snarfing up thistle seeds from my backyard feeder even as I write. Yes, today’s dinosaurs are a biological class twice as numerous as our own, to wit 10,000 species of birds vs. Brusatte’s account of that cataclysm alone is worth the list price.) It took another global catastrophe to destroy them - this time the huge Yucatan meteorite - and even then some survived. Earth was theirs and the fullness thereof. Dinosaurs came to dominate the planet as fully as we do now, albeit they were not just one self-serving species but an entire menagerie, animals of many shapes and all sizes, up to the biggest ever.
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