Buy this book, my beloved said. You love dinosaur science, he said! It’ll be great, he said.

I do love dinosaurs. I was intrigued by the ideas that Brian Ford presented. But I did not love this book. This book is at least three books, maybe more, in one. I’m not sure Ford realised that.

The blurb says that the book “reviews the latest scientific evidence” about dinosaurs to suggest that a lot of things palaeontologists are presenting “are no more than convent fictions.” Whoo, way to go with the controversy. And I would have loved the heck out of a well-argued, well-presented, scientific book about that. In fact, I did love those 80 or 100 pages of this 450-odd page book. But that leaves another 350 or so pages.

In those pages, Ford is doing something completely different. For a start, he’s presenting a history of how humans have interacted with dinosaurs – that is, a history of palaeontology, complete with the theories about some bones belonging to giant humans of the past and so on. Fascinating! but so totally irrelevant to a scientific book about dinosaurs that, to use an in-joke, it’s not even wrong. And then there’s the section on the discovery of continental drift and tectonic plates and so on. Also fascinating. In fact, I think I’ve read a book about that already. This time, not quite so irrelevant to a book about dinosaurs – Ford’s theory is that dinosaurs lived by wading in shallow lakes, and they went extinct with Pangea breaking up and the climate changing and the lakes evaporating – but it didn’t need 50 or so pages on the topic. It definitely didn’t need the entire history lesson on the topic; just a page or two on the facts would have been quite sufficient.

Lastly, there’s also an irritated article for a science journal lurking in here: one which details the ways in which Ford has been ignored and calumniated by the scientific world (in his view). I think that calling out established science, when you have a solid theory that fits the evidence, is a necessary and reasonable thing to do. Maybe it would even fit into a book about that new and exciting but controversial theory. (I’m no palaeontologist but Ford presents a compelling case that should surely actually be considered. But I don’t think it’s presented well here – in that I think it should have been more clearly separated out from a discussion of the science.

So. The theory is really interesting, and if what he says is true – like the astounding energy required to pump blood up to the head of one of those enormous herbivores with super long necks – then I’m not going to be surprised if in a couple decades it’s the standard, or at least viable, way of talking about dinosaurs. But this book was incredibly frustrating because it just didn’t know what it wanted to be.