Thursday, August 31, 2006

Reading Update

I finished reading The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. It wasn't a bad book, but a bit unsatisifying. I wasn't expecting a lot of expose on individuals that were actually out hunting fossils in the Ancient Era, after all they were notoriously disinterested if you followed this book's comments about what other historians have said. It just seemed that this book didn't do very much...research or something.

That's not really fair. Ms Mayor did dig around a lot for various bits of information and interviewed some noted experts - Peter Dodson and Jack Horner, frex - but she didn't completely connect the dots or so it felt to me. Her best effort was that of the legends with respect to the Griffin and the ceratopsian fossils. The second best was talking about the giants and such. It was just...unsatisifying. I had originally thought of picking up her other work about the fossil legends associated with Native Americans, but I think not now.

I am going back through my books on the Permian Extinction right now to do a post here about that subject. I am revisiting Erwin's, Hallam's, Hallam and Wignall's, Benton's, and Ward's books. I am going to be picking up titles for more reading and doing with respect to the house. Some of those are pretty spendy and I haven't decided on what and which for them.

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