Book Reviewszoj_796 714..716

Dinosaurs in Australia. Mesozoic Life from the South-ern Continent by Benjamin P. Kear and Robert J.Hamilton-Bruce. CSIRO Publishing, 2011. Paperback.ISBN 97806-43100459. AU$79.95.

Here is a publication which will appeal to the amateurand the specialist alike. The main title and cover illus-tration will draw the attention of the general reader,whilst the subtitle tells of its scope and content. Dino-saurs in fact are only a small part of the extensiveAustralian fossil record. Whilst there is what the special-ist needs in terms of detail and a quite extensivebibliography, the general reader is taken step by stepthrough the aspects of Mesozoic life, with each new termexplained as it is met. The introductory chapter sets thescene with accounts of types of fossil formation and theirdating, with maps of Gondwanaland and modern plateboundaries. Then the Mesozoic itself is described in somedetail, with the three systems broken down throughseries into the thirty component stages.

Chapters deal with Triassic, Jurassic and Creta-ceous assemblages of plants and animals, each withvery different climatic conditions. There are extensivecoloured illustrations of the various forms of fossils,as well as 12 reconstructions of some of the morespectacular animals, mostly reptiles. That on thecover is of an unnamed theropod dinosaur. Much ofthe fossil record is aquatic, particularly in the Creta-ceous. Australian dinosaur fossils are relatively rarein comparison to their abundance in Asia and theAmericas. For instance, the only definitive Triassicevidence of the group comes from footprints. By theCretaceous, bone fossils are quite abundant but frag-mentary. As well as true dinosaurs, Plesiosaurs andPterosaurs are represented.

This book is comprehensive in its scope and thedetail of its up to date references, and should provevaluable to a very wide readership.

JOHN SELLICK

The Chinese Alligator, Ecology, Behaviour, Conserva-tion and Culture by J. Thorbjarnarson and X. Wang.Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,2010. 268 pp. Hardback. ISBN 13: 978-0-8018-9348-3;ISBN 10: 0-8018-9348-3. £44

It is fair to say that there has been disagreementbetween Western-trained conservation scientistsand those in China. Our own emphasis on habitat/ecosystem conservation and trying to maintain wildpopulations, can be contrasted with the work of thosein China who have concentrated on captive breedingprogrammes, for example with the Giant Panda and –the subject of this book – the Chinese Alligator. Andwho is to say that we can cast aspersions? Pro-grammes based on our in situ approaches for, say,saving the tiger or the rhino, can hardly be said to beunqualified successes.

One of the authors of this book is a Professor ofBiology at the East China Normal University inShanghai. The other, until his death from malariajust before publication, was a senior conservationbiologist with W.C.S. They write sensitively aboutthe in-situ/ex-situ problem, which dominates thefuture for this species. However, the scope of thebook is much broader with chapters detailingmatters such as alligator evolution and the relation-ship of crocodilians to the dragon myths both in theWest and the East. The changes (both prehistoricand recent) in the Yangtse valley, which have madeit one of the most populous areas on earth and themajor site of rice production, are well described in avery readable way. Everything is fully referenced. Itreally is remarkable that any wild alligators exist atall. They were estimated to number 130 ten yearsago and are certainly less now. They survive thesummer in tiny ponds in close association withsmallholdings of rice farmers. In the winter they digburrows and hibernate.

The bulk of work described in the book, on habitatand population status, is based on field surveys by theauthors in the period 1999–2009. This had a bad startin 1998 when a traffic accident severely injured JohnThorbjarnarson and postponed everything by oneyear. The chapter on the alligator’s biology is verygood and it is surprising to find that there are stillmany gaps in this knowledge. It is interesting to learnthat their diet (at least nowadays) is small rodents,beetles, river snails and other molluscs, with only afew fish. Delightful features of the book are the half-tone reproductions of paintings of alligators by PengYe, from the East China Normal University whichpreface each chapter.

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The most salutary chapter is the last one, ‘TheFuture of the Alligator in China’. Ex situ breeding hasresulted in there being thousands of alligators incaptivity. The challenge is to find somewhere for rein-troduction. Industrial development has resulted inenvironmental degradation in this part of China espe-cially. Water in 25% of the country is judged unfiteven for agricultural use let alone people or alligators.Yet the authors are able to see some grounds foroptimism and were able to identify potential sitesfor re-establishing a ‘wild population’. This latterterm has become a bureaucratic concept, which isdescribed in depressing detail. However somethinghas to be done about the Yangtze valley to keep it fitfor human use and they feel that a future for thealligator can be fitted into that.

This really is a book about the current problems oftrying to conserve biodiversity in the modern worldand should be read by anyone with an interest in thatsubject (which should be all of us).

BRIAN LIVINGSTONE

Frogs, The Animal Answer Guide by M. Dorcas andW. Gibbons. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univer-sity Press, 2011. 160 pp. Paperback, half-tone illus-trations and colour plates. ISBN 13: 978-0-8018-9936-2; ISBN 10: 0-8018-9936-2. £13

Arthur Dent to Prak – a witness who has just finished tellingthe truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. ‘None ofit? – You can remember none of it?’‘No. Except most of the good bits were about frogs, I rememberthat.’ (Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to theGalaxy’.)

This compilation of current knowledge on frogs andtoads as a group (individual species are only referredto as examples) is intended for the layman. Thus ifyour question is about early oral ontogeny in tad-poles, you will need to look in the Society’s BiologicalJournal (Candioti et al., 2011). In fact there is actu-ally not much about tadpoles themselves and whatthere is must be searched for under various headings.However it is otherwise very detailed with a full andup to date bibliography that includes websites (tryhttp//amphibiaweb.org).

As the title indicates, the various sections are orga-nised as answers to questions. I suspect the questionsthemselves represent the folder titles in the authors’database. Sometimes this makes the ‘question’ beginwith a rather basic statement such as ‘Can all frogsswim?’ or ‘Do frogs play?’ However the level of detailand information in the ‘answers’ does mean that thebook will still interest even the layman with a sub-stantial knowledge of biology.

There are good and up to date sections on thecauses of decline in frog populations, for examplefrom habitat destruction and chytrid fungus. There isa good chapter on frog colours and how they areproduced (do you know why so many frogs aremore or less green?). Other notes about physiologyare dispersed amongst questions such as ‘Do frogslive in salt water?’ and ‘How do frogs survive thewinter?’

I would have dropped the section on ‘Frogs inliterature’ despite my opening quotation but, by con-trast, the sections on conservation and methods ofresearch are very good. Linnaeus does not receive anymention but taxonomy is there in the very last ques-tion . . . ‘Why do the scientific names and classifica-tion of frogs change frequently?’

Thus, the book does contain a lot of informationexplained at a not too technical level. As a non-herpetologist, I learned several things, some of which,I think, I should have already known. For example,poison arrow frogs gain their deadly toxin from thepoisonous beetles, ants and millipedes that they eat.Feed them on crickets in captivity and they graduallylose their poison. But beware; it may take up to fiveyears, so best to keep gloves on for now.

Overall it is a better and more enjoyable book thanthe title suggests.

BRIAN LIVINGSTONE

REFERENCE

Candioti FV, Baldo D, Kolenc F, Borteiro C, Altig R.2011. Different pathways are involved in the early develop-ment of the transient oral apparatus in anuran tadpoles.Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 104: 330–345.

Extinction and radiation: how the fall of the dinosaursled to the rise of mammals by J. David Archibald.Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,2011. 108 pp. Hardback. ISBN 13: 978-0-8018-9805-1ISBN 10: 0-8018-9805-6. £39.

It’s more than 40 years since I listened to under-graduate lectures on this topic, so I thought I mightget myself updated. I was also interested in the wholeissue of evolutionary transitions – how does a reptilebecome a mammal when every stage of the processhas to be a functionally coherent and fully adapted toits ecological environment? This book is nicely discur-sive and readable, but doesn’t seem to address thatquestion.

From the start it does make two good points: firstthat palaeontologists tend to focus on a single geo-logical era and not the transition between them and

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second, that there were mammals living alongsidedinosaurs (albeit not the familiar taxa that we seetoday). Even a six year-old knows the dinosaurs andtheir long names, even if they can’t spell anythingelse, but nobody seems very aware of the contempo-rary mammals. Eutherians do not appear in theNorth American fossil record until the late Creta-ceous, but recent studies on fossils from central Asiaapparently extend their existence back much earlierand I recall lectures about Morganucodon from evenearlier still. This was a ‘missing link’, a mammal withremnant reptilian features, but it is not mentionedhere. Nor is the recent discovery of ‘the firstmammal’, Juramaia, or its discoverer, so I feelslightly confused rather than updated on the origin offossil mammals, although this book is focussed on thelater Cretaceous-Tertiary transition.

What caused the extinction of dinosaurs is dis-cussed of course. The various challenges (meteorites,acid rain, vulcanism, climate change, overexploitationby aliens, etc.) killed off dinosaurs, large and small,terrestrial and aquatic, yet so many other taxa sur-vived, including mammals, but why? It’s not clearwhat was actually wrong with being a dinosaur.Moving swiftly on, it is firmly (and reasonably)asserted that their removal opened the way to a rapidexpansion of mammals into the groups we knowtoday. However, ‘the molecular clock model’ appar-ently suggests that diversification actually occurredbefore the extinction of dinosaurs. The author

explains away this awkward anomaly by suggestingthat the cataclysms occurring at the end of the Cre-taceous must have somehow caused the molecularclock to speed up. Exactly how is not explained.

What actually is a mammal? This surely is acentral question. The presence of mammae to produceof milk has to be the prime feature, but is not evidentin fossils. Fur and homeothermy are also difficult tostudy in the fossil record. They are what enabledmammals to colonise many extreme environments,but only at the expense of increased energy consump-tion. The relevance and significance of all this is notdiscussed. Two slightly incongruous pages at the endsuggest that a single species (our own) achieving apopulation of 9 billion in the next 40 years willconstitute a major extinction threat for many extantmammals (and much else). Good point, it took mil-lions of years to see off the dinosaurs.

Overall, this book forms a commentary on theauthor’s own research and the context in which it wascarried out. Its narrow focus on molars and the appli-cation of cladistics to establish relationships betweenfossil taxa and their immediate ancestors will appealto the few who are similarly engrossed. But ulti-mately the book doesn’t really answer the questionposed by its subtitle. It doesn’t tell us HOW the fall ofthe dinosaurs led to the rise of mammals, only thatit did.

PAT MORRIS

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© 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 164, 714–716