Dinosaur Impressions: Postcards from a Paleontologist Book

Reading Philippe Taquet's Dinosaur Impressions you can enjoy all the fun of dinosaur hunting without the bone-shaking agonies of 4 x 4 navigation through the "strings of dunes, regs, and strips of very fluid sand called fech-fech". Taquet has been lucky enough to spend much of his professional life globetrotting in search of dinosaurs in the deserts and mountains of North Africa, the forests of Laos and back home in Provence. A well-known French dinosaur expert and author of many technical papers on dinosaurs over the past 30 years, he is now director of the world-famous National Museum of Natural History in Paris. His travelogue is interspersed with the nitty-gritty business of excavating fossilised bones from the rocks and shipping them back home. Then the real tedious work of meticulous preparation and cleaning begins before the skeletons can be reassembled and fleshed out as "once living" animals. Taquet describes his discovery of dinosaurs such as the crested Ouranosaurus from Niger; Cetiosaurus, a sauropod from Morocco; Tarbosaurus, a carnivore from Mongolia; a giant crocodile, Sarcosuchus, from Niger; and dinosaur eggs from the south of France. But this is not just a travelogue; Taquet puts dinosaur studies in their historic context, and it is refreshing to read the story from a continental perspective. Inevitably, the great anatomist of revolutionary France, Georges Cuvier, emerges as the dominant figure and Taquet quotes from his correspondence with the contemporary scientists in England, such as Gideon Mantell, who was involved with some of the first descriptions of dinosaur fossils ever made. As Cuvier wrote, "are we not dealing with a new animal here, a herbivorous reptile? ... time will confirm or deny this idea". I doubt if even the great Cuvier could have guessed just how right he has proved to be by generations of dinosaur hunters like Philippe Taquet. Taquet's book originally appeared in French in 1994 and has been ably translated by the eminent American vertebrate palaeontologist, Professor Kevin Padian of the Berkeley Campus of the University of California. A useful bibliography and index complete the work.Read More