London Natural History Museum

Book review – Ancient Sea Reptiles: Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs & More

7-minute read
keywords: evolution, paleontology

The marine reptiles that roam Earth’s oceans today are but a whisper of a once vast and varied group of marine reptiles that included plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs. As palaeontologist Darren Naish shows here, there were many more, less-familiar organisms and the evolutionary history of the group as a whole is fascinating. Ancient Sea Reptiles is a richly illustrated introduction to their biology and taxonomic diversity that hits the sweet spot when it comes to scientific content, offering a substantive read. Books are a bit like buses: you wait forever and then suddenly two come along. After a dearth of books on this topic, Ancient Sea Reptiles was published just four months after Gregory S. Paul’s The Princeton Field Guide to Mesozoic Sea Reptiles. This, then, is the first of two reviews that takes a deep dive into the world of these extinct marine reptiles.

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Book review – The Inside Out of Flies

6-minute read

Flies do not get a lot of love. Their culinary choices, from cow-pats to corpses, do not endear them to us. Add to that that the order Diptera also hosts mosquitoes, called our deadliest predator by some authors, and you can begin to see why. Entomologist Erica McAlister, the senior curator for Diptera at the Natural History Museum, London, is on a mission to change your mind. Chances are you never have been able to admire a fly close-up.

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Book review – The Secret Life of Flies

5-minute read

Few people would count flies as their favourite animal, but, luckily for you and me, there are exceptions. Erica McAlister, the senior curator for Diptera at the Natural History Museum, London, has been enamoured with them since childhood and in 2017 wrote the very successful The Secret Life of Flies. In preparation for reviewing her new book The Inside Out of Flies, I (finally) read the book that started it all to see what the buzz was all about.

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Book review – American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus

7-minute read

If you visited the London Natural History Museum sometime before 2015 you will have been greeted by the skeleton of a sauropod dinosaur: a plaster cast of Diplodocus affectionately nicknamed Dippy. Dippy has left the building but is not the only such cast in existence. Historian Ilja Nieuwland here traces the little-known history of the philanthropic campaign that saw Scottish-born business magnate Andrew Carnegie donate plaster casts to museums around the world. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, he examines Carnegie’s reasons and the response of the recipients and the general audience, adding a valuable and surprisingly interesting chapter to the history of palaeontology as a discipline.

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