A Grown Up Guide to Dinosaurs

January 13, 2020 2:20 AM

I'm after books, podcasts, documentaries etc on dinosaurs aimed at adults.

I have listened to the A Grown Up Guide to Dinosaurs by Ben Garrod.

I have also watched David Attenborough's Rise of the Animals and Conquest of the Skies.

Is there anything else out there?

posted by poxandplague to Media & Arts (11 answers total)

Best answer: This episode of 99% invisible is about the history of visualising what dinosaurs looked like and how we've interpreted the fossil evidence in vastly different ways. I found it fascinating.
posted by Zumbador at 2:33 AM on January 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte is good, written in a lively and accesible way. Here's an interview with the author from around the time of publication
posted by tomp at 3:05 AM on January 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy by Paige Williams is about people who hunt for, excavate, and piece together dinosaur skeletons and the divide between science and commerce.
posted by carrioncomfort at 5:57 AM on January 13, 2020

Best answer: If you like audiobooks/lectures, I really enjoyed Behold the Mighty Dinosaur (audio lectures by John C. Kricher.)
posted by jb at 6:09 AM on January 13, 2020

Also, while it's not specifically aimed (just) at adults, I've found Eons (webseries from PBS Digital) to be complex enough in the science to be satisfying.

The various paleontology episodes of In Our Time are also great - including one last year on "Feathered Dinosaurs".
posted by jb at 6:15 AM on January 13, 2020

This falls squarely in the "etc" category, but the University of Alberta has free MOOC courses about Dinosaurs. Dino 101 is the main course, and then there are three additional paleontology courses.
posted by Sweetchrysanthemum at 7:29 AM on January 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish (especially the book) is great on how some of the evolutionary aspects of fish and dinosaurs remain in current animals.
posted by scruss at 10:18 AM on January 13, 2020

Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs is a fantastic blog, their "Vintage Dinosaur Art" posts are worth reading all the way back onto their old v1 site. Very interesting insights into how depiction of dinosaurs has changed along with better understanding, with frequent snippets about new discoveries and updated research that a casual enthusiast would be unlikely to come across elsewhere. It's well written, and (at least for my taste) snort-out-loud funny on a regular basis.
posted by protorp at 1:44 PM on January 13, 2020

Michael Benton's most famous book is 'The Day The Earth Nearly Died', which is pretty good overview of Permian event, with Paleontologists arguing, and fun digression to when pigs ruled the earth. Benton has a bunch of books, some academic, some for youth, and some in between.
posted by ovvl at 2:40 PM on January 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I enjoyed My Beloved Brontosaurus, which is aimed at people who loved dinosaurs as children and want to know what has changed in our knowledge of dinosaurs since then (it was published in 2013).
posted by zoetrope at 9:28 AM on January 14, 2020

Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs is more a paleontologist's adventure/travelogue, but it has neat stuff about birds, nesting, and social behavior.

Related: T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. Excellent account of the 'asteroid impact' theory of dino extinction by the scientist who drove the effort. Science, personalities, politics, opposition...just a great read. In my lifetime, from certainty about an ice age to rocks from space. Science!
posted by j_curiouser at 7:52 PM on January 14, 2020