The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs by DavidHone. Bloomsbury Sigma, London, 2016. No. of pages: 304. Price: UK£12‐99. ISBN 978‐1‐4729‐1126‐1 (paperback).

Abstract

Dinosaurs. Again. I am not really complaining. Honest. One of the favourite groups of ancient organisms deserves its popularity, and David Hone has written an exposé of the most loved of these, the tyrannosaurs. Hone writes in a comfortable ‘bedside’ manner, just right for a book that is aimed for an informed yet not necessarily specialist audience. Illustrations, including colour plates, are good. Some numbering of figures is eccentric – fig. 5a is on p. 46, yet 5b is on p. 57. Errors in the text are few but include wrongly italicised Ankylosaurs (p. 40) and fragements (p. 53). Preliminary chapters include, unusually, an informative ‘Note from the illustrator’, Scott Hartman, and a brief introduction to tyrannosaur osteology. Names of bones that are also figured are mainly in bold, but nasals are not in bold but illustrated (p. 17), whereas the atlas vertebra is bold yet not labelled on the relevant diagram (p. 18). All chapters are well written and informative, but I am unimpressed that Hone explains the importance of radiometric dating and downplays the relevance of biostratigraphic correlation (pp. 73–74). Some aspects are also imprecise in their explanation; ‘Small fossils are harder for us to find than large ones …’ (p. 76) contradicts a comment on the same page, ‘… small species tend to be more numerous than large ones’. Hone's book is divided into four sections encompassing 19 chapters. Part 1 is introductory, covering obvious and relevant aspects such as history of research, diversity, relationships and biogeography. Hone introduces the history of dinosaur research with a suitably broad brush and even major figures, like Barnum Brown, who excavated the first Tyrannosaurus rex (Dingus and Norrell, 2010), receives scant mention. Yet this is understandable; Hone's focus is on what we know, not what we knew. He is in a rush to get to the hard facts. Part 2, ‘Morphology’, is divided, logically, into six chapters such as ‘Skull’ and ‘Limbs’ and forms an informative whole. Hone's explanations can be sparkling, even Wodehousian, none more so than when discussing the function of bone trabeculae: ‘… would provide strength – a little like the spokes strengthen a bike wheel’ (p. 105). The problems posed by track sites (whodunit?) are understood (p. 119), not a universal attainment of dinosaur workers. Yet Hone can be repetitious, such as when he uses feathered – feathers – feathery four times in one sentence (p. 127). Part 3, ‘Ecology’, is less satisfactory, essentially because the data is scantier and more difficult to interpret. A bed of fossil oysters, with borings, encrusters and other obvious organism-organism interactions, may yield more solid, reproducible palaeoecological data than all the tyrannosaur fossils known. Such is the nature of the fossil record; marine invertebrates are a richer source of ecological information than terrestrial vertebrates, although I salute workers on tyrannosaurs for gleaning the not inconsiderable dataset discussed by Hone. But Part 4, ‘Moving forwards’, is largely speculative and provides a weak finish to Chronicles. If these speculations had been integrated into earlier chapters and the book ended with a short, sharp finale, the ending would undoubtedly been stronger. Overall, this is a book that will please armchair dinosaur buffs, but which will also be widely read amongst the experts. Similarly informed volumes on other dinosaur groups would be welcome additions to the literature.