What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects, Disease, and Death ... (ISBN 0691124310)

The Darker Side of Jurassic Park:
Most dinosaur lovers will find this an interesting read, although a few of the reconstructions are not for the squeamish. In considering the heyday of the dinosaurs, books don't often mention that just like modern animals, they were tormented by the biting flies, mosquitoes and midges we find in amber today, weakened by parasites and fungus, and infected by lethal diseases carried by ticks, fleas and nematodes, some of which could have whittled down individual dinosaur populations beyond the point of recovery. Most people know that dragonflies and cockroaches have been around since before the dinosaurs, but the fact that the modern world's two deadliest infectious diseases, malaria and Leishmaniasis, were also around and may have killed off whole dinosaur herds was new to me. The Poinars don't carry their thesis quite to the point of claiming that parasites and disease were what ended the Age of the Dinosaurs, but they certainly present an alternate candidate worth thinking about.

Thin skins:
I never consciously thought about it, but I guess I assumed that dinosaurs had thick, tough hides, like a rhinoceros. Apparently not. George and Roberta Poinar, whose research interest is what fossil amber can reveal about ancient insects, say dino skin "was surprisingly thin and reptilian." This makes a difference, because the point of "What Bugged the Dinosaurs?" is that "biting insects were the top predators in the food chain" during the Cretaceous, not T. rex. Conveniently, amber deposits, with engulfed insects, exist at 20-million-year intervals from the Age of Terrible Lizards, er, Terrible Insects. The oldest is from Lebanon, the middle deposit from Burma and the youngest (still 75 million years old) from Canada. The authors discuss how amber works, consider such questions as "did dinosaurs or insects 'invent' flowering plants?" and then illustrate different kinds of insects well-preserved in amber: biting midges, sand flies, mosquitoes, blackflies, horseflies and deerflies, fleas and lice, ticks and mites (not insects) and parasitic worms (also not insects). They consider what diseases these insects could have transmitted to dinosaurs and, in the grand finale, make an argument that insects could have been big players in one or more mass extinctions, including the end of the dinosaurs. They don't dismiss the idea of a killer giant meteor, but they ask, "Since insect species represent the majority of animal diversity, why haven't they ever been mentioned in most discussions of mass extinctions?" And they conclude, "We believe that disease played a significant role in dinosaur extinction during the terminal Cretaceous." The book is well-illustrated with large scale color pictures of insects (and nematodes and other assorted critters) in amber.

What Bugged The Dinosaurs:
If your main interest is paleoentomology, this might be a helpful reference. It was interesting to see some contemporary looking species in ancient amber. Disease undoubtedly affected the dinosaurs, but if you want to consider another reason why they most likely went extinct, this is not likely to persuade. It's also not engagingly written and it's too long...the point was made in the first chapter.

Where were the editors?:
I agree with the reviewer who pointed out that the book is too long for the amount of information in it. At least sixty percent of the book is unscientific speculation and/or irrelevant drivel. The other annoying facet of the book is the frequency of grammatical errors - use of "than" for "then" to mention just one that occurs several times. One would think that Princeton could produce better than this. There is a kernal of interesting information and some wonderful photographs. It feels like there was material worthy of an article in a professional journal and someone suggested padding it into a book.