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Summary: Great
Review: An excellent book with wonderful pen drawned illustrations but the author. Bakker writes in a very fun and engaging fashion. His ideas helped to revolutionize paleontology (some of his ideas are also old) and it's a fun read.
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Summary: Test for freshness
Review: An excellent treatment treatment of dinosaur physiologies. But be wary of its freshness. It was first published as a paperback by Penguin in 1988.
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Summary: The Dinosaure Heresies
Review: An extremely unbiest book with a pendulum swing of different theories and counter arguments. A worth while buy for anybody interested in dinosuares and/or birds.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating, if not always correct
Review: Any dinosaur enthusiasist should have this book. The text is eminently readable, and many of the proposls made are ahead of their time and thought-provoking. The drawings are excellent and more realistically approximate the probable apppearance of dinosaurs, especially ceratopsins, than any others I've seen.
Bakker is entitled to his occasional displays of hubris given the number of times he has successfully defied convention and been proven correct. However, I cannot agree with his theories regarding extinction of these animals, since the impact theory is simply too compelling in terms of hard evidence. Only for this reason do I not give the book a five star rating. Even so, it is a must read.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating, if not always correct
Review: Any dinosaur enthusiasist should have this book. The text is eminently readable, and many of the proposls made are ahead of their time and thought-provoking. The drawings are excellent and more realistically approximate the probable apppearance of dinosaurs, especially ceratopsins, than any others I've seen.
Bakker is entitled to his occasional displays of hubris given the number of times he has successfully defied convention and been proven correct. However, I cannot agree with his theories regarding extinction of these animals, since the impact theory is simply too compelling in terms of hard evidence. Only for this reason do I not give the book a five star rating. Even so, it is a must read.
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Summary: Dinosaur orthodoxy
Review: As many say this is a fabulous book on dinosaurs. In my experience, nobody described dinosaurs as living thing with blood & meet(except Gregory Paul). Even though he quit the career as dinosaulogist, I'm sure he can earn his living as ethologist with his vast knowledge about animales of the day. His interpretations have frecuently been taken "exaggerated". As for me, his explanation is quite clear & easy to imagine on which animal's behaviour he's based on. So if someone knows better animal behaviour or anatomy, it'd be easy to discuss with him on the subject because it's not a pure speculation but one that has firm base. Even though he might be wrong in some part, there had been nobody tried to combine the fossilized bones with observations & studies of living creature. He is the man that resurrect the dinosaurs in true meaning. In short, this is written by an author who knows paleontology & ethology at once.
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Summary: The Man Who Made a Revolution?
Review: Back in the 1970's Robert Bakker, with a push from John Ostrom, stirred up the field of Vertebrate Paleontology with an article in Scientific American and a paper presented at a conference published in: A Cold Look at the Warm Blooded Dinosaurs. This book is the popularization of that paper. Bakker,s defense of his theory was so effective that suddenly the consensus about dinosaurs, best represented in popular form by the books of Edwin Colbert, fell apart, and dinosaur study stopped being primarily about classification and moved out into realms of biology only given minimal cosideration before. Suddenly, paleontologists were out serching not just for specimens but for evidence of dinosaur behavior and phisiology. This tightly argued book is your ticket into the controversey, by the man whose arguments started a renaissance in dinosaur studies, the so called bad boy of paleontology, Robert Bakker.
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Summary: Fun, fast, and loose writing style brings it all together
Review: Bakker's writing takes the shape of the Dinosaurs he so lovingly describes, bouncy, fun, and fast, just like I remember them from when I was a child. I never took them for the slow moving, nearly dead and dumb as a doornail, and now I know I am not alone. His loose writing style is easy to read, as opposed to the many "text books" there are on the Dinosauria. All this and the artwork that accompanies the words isn't that bad either.
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Summary: Very convincing
Review: Before reading the book, I thought Bakker's idea was a bit 'out there', however, after reading the book, I am conviced of his theories. He back his argument with reliable source, he has a conter-argument for every argument against his theory, and the art work in the book are one of the best I've seen. In conclusion, after reading the book, I can see the reason why Bakker push so hard his theories of warm-blooded dinosaurs, simply because they are true!
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic popular science
Review: Dinosaur Heresies is everything a popular science title should be. This book is a free-wheeling, thought-provoking, incredibly fun jaunt through the range of controversies and rethinkings paleontology has seen in the past twenty years or so. Robert Bakker, first of all, is probably the best popular science writer I've ever come across. His voice is accessible, full of humor and character, and he writes a lean, sharply-turned argument that's easy and fun to follow without being at all pedantic. You don't think, at all, about the welter of disparate arguments Bakker's making in this book, because he just tells them so darn well, he really does. This book is pure delight for anyone with even a passing interest in dinosaurs. I will mention, again, that this is a pop science title. It's a summary of the sorts of things that show up in academic articles, and a broad, idea-spinning take on those issues and problems. If, reading some other reviews here, you get the impression Robert Bakker singlehandedly rethought the whole cold-bloodedness thing, well, don't get too carried away. Pop science books don't do that work. Peer-review journals are where the evidence lives, in science, and books like Dinosaur Heresies get the word out to you and me. I would recommend this as a gift to give anyone twelve or older who has an interest in Dinosaurs. Later on someone may be enthused enough to try Jack Horner, who's slightly less accessible in my experience, and closer to the journal writers than Heresies is. Then, too, reading this book might throw you in all sorts of other directions. (I personally became really excited about prehistoric mammals.) I hate to be hackneyed, but that's what a dazzlingly good popular science book will do; it'll broaden your world and make you remember what curiosity is good for. Dinosaur Heresies does that, in spades. You'll reread it.
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