The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker.

This is a book that came out in the mid-80s but in many ways it’s a seminal work because, although it has a number of idiosyncrasies, it is actually a work that kickstarted some of the modern views we hold about dinosaurs today. In particular, in this work he made clear that dinosaurs were not sluggish lizard-like animals but were very active, very dynamic and actually behaved a lot more like modern birds and mammals with very complex behaviours and social lives that hadn’t been thought about previously. So, this is a book that really got me interested in dinosaurs when I was a teenager and it has some very interesting ideas in it that a lot of people have tried to run with. Some of them have fallen by the wayside but others have subsequently become almost dogma.

Like what?

For example, some of the ideas were to do with body temperature in dinosaurs which have been very heavily debated and nowadays it is thought that dinosaurs had some kind of metabolic regime intermediate between a very warm-blooded mammal or bird and that of a crocodile. So, in part Bakker seems to have been right in thinking that dinosaurs have a physiology more advanced than that which we usually associate with reptiles. He also came up with lots of behavioural ideas about how these animals would interact in terms of parenting, how they would interact in their fighting behaviour, their display behaviour when looking for mates. Again, generally he was looking at them as much more sophisticated, complex creatures than had previously been thought. This book represents the culmination of ideas that he’d been throwing around for about ten years. It’s really only from the 70s onwards that we start to get this change in view and only from the 80s that we had a crystallisation of this view that dinosaurs were very exciting animals. For most of the 20th century dinosaurs were viewed as a dead end – an evolutionary dead end that was kind of interesting because they were big and odd-looking, but that never really went anywhere. It was the recognition in the 70s that dinosaurs and birds were closely related, and that dinosaurs were more like birds than like other reptiles, that suddenly led to a new burst of interest in them and new research programmes. If you spoke to a student in the 1940s or 50s they would just view dinosaurs as curiosities, but these days they’re viewed as an integral part of a greater knowledge of how animals are related to each other and how animal behaviour has changed through time, not just as a side-show oddity.

Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur by Tom Rea.

This one has a more historical flavour. He goes back to the late 19th century, looking at the early discoveries of some really spectacular dinosaur specimens in the American West. So, in particular, up until this point all we knew about dinosaurs were a few pieces from Europe and some other far-flung parts of the world, but we hadn’t found any complete skeletons of dinosaurs. Then suddenly, in the 1870s and 1880s, they were recovered in large numbers, in Colorado, Wyoming and around there. Until then people had been looking in places where it is quite hard to find them, because, although they’re there in western Europe, it’s built over, farmed, urbanised, such that there were relatively few chances to look for dinosaur fossils. As pioneers started heading out to the American West, following the railroads and trying to make their way to the gold fields in California, they are going to very desolate country where it’s much easier to find fossils because the rocks are at the surface and exposed. The rocks were the right age and type to have lots of dinosaur fossils in. So, as people were heading for gold, a lot of those people were actually involved in some of these very early dinosaur discoveries.

Which dinosaurs were discovered in the American West?

A lot of the iconic dinosaurs that we see in exhibitions and museums today. Some very good examples of the gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs, like Diplodocus, those things with very long giraffe-like necks, big fat barrel-shaped bodies and very long tails. Lots of examples of these were found complete – so, Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus, and some of the really big carnivorous dinosaurs too like Allosaurus who would have been preying on these things.

Are there periods of time where different dinosaurs were dominant? Were some extinct while others were alive, or is it kind of one long period of dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs were around from about 225 million years ago to 65 million years ago, at which point they all became extinct apart from their direct descendants – birds.

A pretty good run.

They were around for a very long time and during that time we get lots of different sorts of dinosaurs appearing and disappearing, so the sorts of dinosaurs we see early on are very different to those we see 50 million and 100 million years later. To start with, dinosaurs were pretty small animals, then through time they get much bigger, their body shapes change, some go back down on to all fours and you get a very wide variety of shapes and sizes and all sorts of different diets and behaviours. We start off from very simple beginnings and get much more complicated through time. So, in fact, Tyrannosaurus rex  would have been around much, much later than the earliest dinosaurs. In fact, the distance in time between us and T. rex is smaller than that between T. rex and the earliest dinosaur, so they were around a really long time and underwent a huge amount of evolution.

The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury.

This was a huge bestseller and another historical book dealing with the very earliest discovery of dinosaurs, pre-dating the spectacular finds in the US, which most people don’t realise were actually found in southern England – Sussex, Surrey, Kent and the Isle of Wight. These were the first fossils ever to be described scientifically, back in the early part of the 19th century. She deals with the circumstances of the discoveries, how they were initially interpreted, because nothing like this had ever been seen before, and also the personal rivalries between the scientists who were working on this very rare material.

Excellent. Tell me about the rivalries.

The two main protagonists are Gideon Mantell, a Sussex-based country doctor who was actually someone who went out looking for these remains as a kind of obsessive hobby, and did a lot of work in finding and describing these animals. His nemesis, if you like, was Richard Owen who went on to become the first director of the Natural History Museum. Owen was a career academic and a brilliant man but didn’t have all the scruples that you may have wanted. They competed very strongly and there were some very nasty incidents on both sides. Owen would rip off Mantell’s ideas, try and poach specimens from collections that Mantell was working with and try to suppress publication of some of Mantell’s work. In return, although Mantell was definitely on the receiving end, he was a vain character and was so obsessive about these animals that his doctor’s practice went to seed, his wife left him (which was very unusual at that time, but he was so obsessed with these things) and his eldest son emigrated to New Zealand to get away from him. So you have these two very irascible characters competing.

I notice in the Natural History Museum dino-directory (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/jdsml/nature-online/dino-directory) that there are only two types of dinosaur in Japan.

They are not very common in Japan, though there are more now in the updated directory, I think.

I thought that when dinosaurs were around the land-mass was in one block?

It depends when. When they first appeared the continents were all joined in a single land-mass called Pangaea. Through the time the dinosaurs were around that land-mass breaks up, so when T. rex was around, close to the end of the age of dinosaurs, it’s starting to look a lot more like the world we’re familiar with today, with the Atlantic opening up and the continents approaching their present-day positions.

There’s a stunning number of dinosaur species here.

There are about 1,200 main species of which 800 to 850 are currently considered to be valid, depending on who you ask.

What do you mean? How can it be invalid? Either it’s a dinosaur or not, surely?

There is sometimes doubt over whether a particular fossil skeleton is distinctive enough to deserve a new name.