Pegasus Books

Book review – The Science of Middle-Earth: A New Understanding of Tolkien and His World

7-minute read

I will make no secret of my love of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. Equally, I am always entertained by books looking at the science behind fictional worlds depicted in books, movies, and TV series. The Science of Middle Earth is a remarkable undertaking, with three editors bringing together contributions on a wide range of topics, from humanities such as sociology and philosophy, to natural sciences such as geomorphology, chemistry, and evolutionary biology. Tying it together are Arnaud Rafaelian’s beautiful drawings that immediately draw your attention. Both a serious appreciation of Tolkien’s world and an entertaining work of popular science, this book hit the sweet spot.

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Book review – Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by Their Trace Fossils

6-minute read

Say “dinosaurs”, and most people imagine fossilised bones and spectacular museum displays. But body fossils are not the only remains we have with which to reconstruct dinosaur lives. Nor, and this might sound controversial, are they the most important. Or so argues palaeontologist, geologist, and ichnologist Anthony J. Martin. Ichnology is the study of animal traces, whether modern or fossilised. Most traces are ephemeral and disappear within hours or days, but occasionally some are buried and end up in the fossil record. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, and with more puns than you can shake a T. rex thigh bone at, Martin forays into the rich dinosaur trace fossil record: from footprints, burrows, and nests, to teeth marks and fossil faeces. For all the jokes, and despite having been published in 2014, he raises some really interesting points.

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Book review – A Polar Affair: Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

7-minute read

This has to be a story worthy of the name “scoop of the century”. Penguin biologist Lloyd Spencer Davis has been studying mating behaviour in Adelie penguins since 1977, carefully documenting how penguins are far from the paragons of monogamy that they were long held to be. That is until 2012 when an unpublished manuscript comes to light showing that somebody beat him to the punch… by more than six decades! A certain George Murray Levick carefully documented the same penguin antics that Davis would later build his career on. But who was this Levick? And why did he never publish his observations? Join Davis for a most unlikely story of polar exploration, penguins, and perversion.

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Book review – King of the Dinosaur Hunters: The Life of John Bell Hatcher and the Discoveries that Shaped Paleontology

When I think of turn-of-the-20th-century palaeontology, names such as Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope are the first to come to mind. Their infamous rivalry, known as the Bone Wars, relied heavily on field collectors who did the back-breaking labour of prospecting and quarrying for fossils. Most of these bone hunters are barely remembered, and John Bell Hatcher might very well have remained thus. This meticulous biography by American palaeontologist Lowell Dingus saves Hatcher from obscurity and documents both his hugely successful work as a bone hunter, as well as his later stellar but tragically short-lived career as a curator.

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Book review – Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science

“Grey as a mouse,
Big as a house,
Nose like a snake,
I make the earth shake, […]”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, “The Black Gate is Closed”

Even Hobbits knew about elephant-like creatures. But, not so long ago, we didn’t. This book starts off with a striking realisation. Our distant ancestors lived with mammoths, using their meat, hides and bones, possibly even overhunting them to extinction. Despite having lived side-by-side with these large, majestic creatures, somewhere along the line we forgot what they were – the details of their identity not being passed down the generations and gradually fading from our stories, our myths and legends, and, finally, from our collective memory. Even though their remains were with us through the millennia, we forgot the mammoth. In turn, their remains fueled new myths and legends, from the Greek Cyclops and Titans, to Chinese dragons, the Biblical giants, and the Siberian idea of giant burrowing moles that would die upon exposure to air. How do you reconstruct the identity of a creature for which your frame of reference is gone?

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