Book Week 2025, Day 2: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte

This one starts with a personal note. I’ve never blogged much about the media whirlwind that accompanied the announcement of Sauroposeidon. Rich Cifelli and I did tons of interviews, separately and together, for local and national television news, newspapers, and magazines. Sauroposeidon got an 1/8th-page box in TIME magazine and a half-page news piece in the journal Science — the latter was especially satisfying, given that Science had rejected our manuscript without review, for having been deemed, ha ha, insufficiently newsworthy.

Of all the interviews I did about Sauroposeidon, by far the best was the one for Dinosaur World, a fanzine published by Allen and Diane Debus from 1997 to 2001. I did the interview over the phone, in the vert paleo library in the then-new OMNH building, now the Sam Noble Museum. I remember talking for close to two hours. In both process — quality, detail, and insight of questions asked — and product, that interview stood head and shoulders above all the others put together. It would have been a standout effort from any interviewer, at any level of professional training or achievement. In point of fact, the interviewer was a 15-year-old kid, who managed to smoke professional science writers with decades of experience.

As you’ve likely figured out, that 15-year-old kid was Steve Brusatte.

Although our circles haven’t intersected very frequently, I’ve watched Steve’s career with great interest, and enjoyed talking with him whenever the opportunities came around. He’s gone from strength to strength, and at each step I’ve thought, “Yep, that tracks.” The same qualities that he showed as a teenage dinosaur afficionado — passionate interest, broad reading, an eye for detail and another for the wider canvas, an adamantine work ethic, and, I think not coincidentally, generally being an agreeable human being — turn out to be a pretty good recipe for success in science.

Nowhere is that better displayed than in Steve’s book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. It was first published in 2018, and I read it during the COVID-19 lockdown, so this blog post is more than little belated. But the book holds up, in no small part because the higher-level picture of dinosaur evolution and biogeography that was emerging when it was published is still more or less intact, nudged here and there by the churn of new discoveries, but not overturned or changed beyond recognition. In the decade after I graduated with my PhD, I mostly had my head down, in the Morrison and in the human anatomy lab, and I’d fallen behind on the big picture of dinosaur paleobiology and evolution. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs helped me get caught up. I can’t think of a single other book that does such a good job of tying what was going on with the dinosaurs at any given time with what was going on with the planet. Steve grounds the global narrative by deftly interweaving his personal experiences in the field and the lab. He really captures the excitement of the hunt, and the occasional disappointments as well. I was especially impressed by his willingness to say “we don’t know yet” at several crucial junctures — hopefully this book inspires some kids to go hit the hills and badlands and find out.

When I was 12, I devoured John Noble Wilford’s The Riddle of the Dinosaur, which at the time was probably the definitive popular science book on dinosaurs and dinosaur paleontology. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is the heir apparent, three decades on, but it surpasses Wilford’s noble effort by dint of Steve’s first-hand experience in field and lab — the story of dinosaurs isn’t one he’s covering from the outside, but one that he’s helping to tell from the inside.

If someone asked me, perhaps a bit skeptically, “What’s interesting about dinosaurs? Why would anyone want or need to know about them?”, this is the book I would hand them. That’s about the highest praise I have to offer.

Closing confession: I also own Steve’s following book, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, but haven’t read it yet, mostly because, dinosaur supremacist that I am, I haven’t been able to summon the will to read a whole book about stinkin’ mammals. Watch this space.