Alexandra A. de Sousa about

We do not know whether Neanderthals would have blended in with modern humans, but we certainly do have a lot of real (and imagined) ideas about who they were. This point is well made by the book titled “The Neanderthals”, which under the writing of Müller & Schrenk fi ts well into the series “People of the Ancient World”. Although this book has “nothing revolutionary to say”,[...]

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Ilja Nieuwland about

The history of vertebrate paleontology has simultaneously been very well and very poorly served in the past. Certain periods have seen tens or hundreds of publications devoted to them, and there’s little new to be found out about London in the 1830s and 1840s, or the Bone Wars of the 1870s and 1880s. But there’s still a whole world to be discovered. One of the – many – admirable qualities of Brian Switek’s first book, Written in Stone, is that Switek generally steers clear from re-hashing the historical warhorses of vertebrate paleontology and so offers something that holds interest for both the lay reader and the paleontological veteran.

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B.L. Beatty about

Paleopathology, as a science, has a deep and rich history, and most so for that which is focused on humans. Cases of pathologies in mummies, ancient buried skeletons, and even simply historical records are abundant, and have been praised not just for helping us understand the history of disease, but also in the role they play in humanizing history and historical figures. But this focus on cases has resulted in little available literature and direction in methods that are not simply the methods used by modern pathologists. While the interpretation of paleopathologies has had some very helpful standardization (Buikstra & Ubelaker, 1994), as well as discussions on theoretical limitations and opportunities in how they should be interpreted in animals in an evolutionary context (Beatty & Heckert, 2009, Beatty & Rothschild, 2009, Beatty & Dooley, 2010, Wolff, 2008, Wolff, 2009), methodologies used with modern technologies are largely relegated to the primary literature. In Pinhasi and Mays’s recent edited volume, “Advances in Human Palaeopathology”, we get a comprehensive collection of all the most up to date reviews on modern methods used in paleopathology of ancient humans. The book is organized in two parts: Analytical Approaches in Palaeopathology (chapters 1-9) and Diagnosis and Interpretation of Disease in Human Remains (chapters 10-16). Here I will review these chapters for their content and how they may be utilized by vertebrate palaeontologists.

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B.L. Beatty about

The history of palaeontology tends to focus on Darwin, Cope and Marsh, or if someone is particularly scholarly, the Burgess Shale. But with the exception of studies on Darwin, few of these ever delve deeper in the broader meaning of the history of palaeontology in any Kuhnian paradigm shifting nature. That may be because palaeontology, despite all the excitement over new technologies and integrations with developmental biology, morphometrics or cladistics, is still largely dependant on classical methods – one needs to find and dig up the fossils, then identify and describe them, before much else can be done with them. Palaeontology had remained something of a “stamp-collecting” science, at least on a procedural basis as it was perceived, until the development of what most would call paleobiology. This book, edited by David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse, is a chronicle of the history of how paleobiology got “to the high table” in evolutionary biology. Perhaps most impressive, these editors managed to get these chapters together so cohesively, and by many of the original authors of seminal papers in what started in the early 1970s, including Raup, Bambach, Hallam, Sepkoski, and Valentine. It is unfortunate that Steven J. Gould and Jack Sepkoski and Tom Schopf did not live to contribute to this, but it is clear from the repeated focus on these individuals in the chapters by others that their influence is omnipresent despite their lack of authorship here.

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H.D. Sues about

The Ceratopsia or horned dinosaurs are a very distinctive group of ornithischian dinosaurs. All have a narrow beak, and most have bony collars or frills extending from the back of the skull. The earliest forms were still rather small and bipedal. Later taxa attained large head and body size and became quadrupedal; they are often considered the dinosaurian analogue of a rhinoceros. Most of these derived forms also sport prominent nasal and/or supraorbital horns. One of the geologically youngest ceratopsians, Triceratops, ranks among the most widely known dinosaurs, rivaling its likely predator, Tyrannosaurus rex, in popular recognition.
Despite their appeal, ceratopsians have been the subject of only a few comprehensive studies. [...]

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