BOOK REVIEW Tetrapod zoology book one, by ...

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themed blog called Tetrapod Zoology (affectionately known as 'Tet ... in the best sense of that term. ... more informative than the main posts themselves – and.
Historical Biology Vol. 23, No. 4, December 2011, 439–440

BOOK REVIEW Tetrapod zoology book one, by Darren Naish, CFZ Press, 2010, 318 pp., (paperback), ISBN 978-1-905723-61-4 Darren Naish is the owner of the highly popular sciencethemed blog called Tetrapod Zoology (affectionately known as ‘Tet Zoo’), which is currently hosted at www. scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology. Naish’s blog, which he has run since 2006, covers an astonishingly wide range of topics that relate to, well, tetrapod zoology. A vertebrate paleontologist by training, he has both a professional and a personal interest in amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, both living and fossil. He has published technical papers on, for instance, British Mesozoic dinosaurs, pterosaur palaeobiology and Neogene seals. In addition to his academic output, Naish has also published a considerable number of semi-technical and popular papers and books, and he has worked as a consultant for various television documentaries. He is thus no stranger to popularisation of science, but his blog postings are rather more ambitious pieces of writing than your garden variety popular science journalism; indeed, it is hardly an overstatement to say that they represent ‘natural history’ in the best sense of that term. More often than not, Naish’s articles are so thoroughly researched and so meticulously referenced that calling them ‘popular’ does not quite seem to do them justice. No wonder, then, that Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology blog has over the last few years attracted an ever-increasing number of knowledgeable and insightful people, many of whom themselves are scientists, to become regular readers and commentators. No wonder, either, that many people have encouraged Naish to also publish his blog posts in print form. The result is Tetrapod zoology book one, in which Naish’s blog articles have been compiled into a 46-chapter book. As the book’s title implies, this is clearly hoped and anticipated to be the first in a whole series of such books. At this point, however, I must voice my reservations about the choice of title. For starters, it cannot seem but a little bit premature to call this volume ‘Book one’. More importantly, however, it is doubtful whether an ultradescriptive title such as ‘Tetrapod zoology’ is attentiongrabbing enough for those potential readers who are not already familiar with Naish and his blog. Surely, a main goal with publishing a book like this is – or ought to be – to attract wholly new readers, rather than just settle for catering to the already existing fans? Highly popular in the science blogosphere though he is, as an author Naish has not quite yet become a household name a` la Sir David Attenborough or Richard Dawkins. Naish’s writings ISSN 0891-2963 print/ISSN 1029-2381 online http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2010.533949 http://www.tandfonline.com

certainly do deserve the widest possible readership; thus, this book should have been given a more ‘sellable’ title (or, at the very least, a clever subtitle). Before turning to the actual contents of Tetrapod zoology book one, one must note that a book is, by its very nature, a very different kind of medium from a weblog. The most notable aspect of Naish’s blog that is, inevitably, missing from the book is the near-simultaneous feedback from, and the interaction with, his readers. It frequently happens that the Tet Zoo comments threads become even more informative than the main posts themselves – and that is not intended as a criticism of Naish’s writings. In this book, however, the blog articles must stand alone. How do they survive the transition into printed form? For the most part, they actually do hold up pretty well. As in his blog articles, the author’s infectious and disarming enthusiasm for his subject matter permeates the book’s text. And of one thing one can be certain: few if any people – and that includes even the most well-read professional zoologists – will be able to truthfully claim that they have learned nothing new from reading Naish’s writings. The amount of information presented in his blog postings/book chapters, and the sheer diversity of topics that they cover, is nothing short of remarkable. In this book there is, just to take a few examples, a chapter on bearkilling pythons, on giant tortoise phylogeny, on Triassic ichthyosaurs, on cryptic bird species possibly occurring on the Falklands Islands, on the question whether Mesozoic dinosaurs were playful, and on the recently discovered kipunji, the putatively new African monkey species. Not all of the articles deal with such exotic subjects, either; in fact, one of the most impressive things about Naish’s writings is that he is able to present fascinating facts and offer interesting perspectives on the seemingly most mundane subjects. For example, Naish shows that, anatomically, physiologically and behaviourally, the common rabbit just might be the most freakish and weird of all extant mammals. And in another chapter, the author muses about what happens to the corpses of animals that die in trees. Throughout the book, Naish maintains a commendably objective attitude towards his subject matter, and when he is writing about controversial topics, competing viewpoints usually get a fair hearing. This is most evident in what is, in my opinion, the book’s best chapter, ‘Why azhdarchids were giant storks’. Here, before offering the explanation that he himself prefers, the author presents and evaluates a number of different hypotheses that have been offered for reconstructing the paleobiology of azhdarchid

440 Book review pterosaurs. Another notable chapter, which also happens to be the book’s longest as well as the richest in personal detail, is an amusing account of Naish’s own work on a Mesozoic sauropod specimen from the Isle of Wight; here, he tells the tale about the long and at times frustrating process that took place before the paper describing the fossil finally saw publication. During his professional career, Naish has not shied away from occasionally tackling rather offbeat subjects. He has, for example, recently co-authored a technical paper that investigated the question whether the giraffe, as is often stated in the literature, really is incapable of swimming (Henderson and Naish 2010). But his real pet subject is cryptozoology, i.e., the research on animals that are currently unknown to science. Naish makes no secret about this, and many of the articles that he has published on his blog, as well as a good few of those that have made it to the current compilation, have a cryptozoological slant. It should be emphasised that Naish’s approach towards cryptozoology is decidedly not one of uncritical acceptance of sensational claims; to the contrary, Naish has earned himself something of a reputation as a debunker of, in particular, photographs of various alleged ‘sea monster’ carcasses (including the so-called Montauk Monster, a minor internet sensation in 2008, which Naish was able to convincingly show, on his blog, to be nothing but a decomposing raccoon). There are no sea monster articles included in the current book, but there is a chapter on the alleged presence of alien big cats (or ABCs) in the UK. Naish briefly reviews some of the, in his opinion, most compelling evidence for the reality of such animals; he makes a reasonable case for the authenticity of at least some British ABC sightings, although, as he also makes clear, occasional escapees do not necessarily result in selfsustaining populations. As has been said, Naish clearly writes with both a lay audience as well as his colleagues in academia in mind. Finding a good balance between the popular and the technical is notoriously tricky, but Naish mostly succeeds in this endeavour. For the most part, his articles are neither too lightweight nor too heavy-going. That said, including a glossary might have been helpful; the precise meaning of terms such as ‘clade’, ‘taxon’ or ‘phylogeny’ (all of which are frequently used throughout the book) may not be obvious to the book’s non-specialist readers. Every chapter of the book is illustrated with drawings and/or photographs. These black-and-white illustrations are mostly adequate, although some are rather too small and

a few others have not, alas, reproduced particularly well. Some of the chapters, perhaps especially the one dealing with gull phylogeny, would have benefited from the addition of a cladogram. The articles selected for this compilation were originally written in 2006, the year when Naish started blogging. Science, of course, has marched on since then, and content-wise some of the articles are now slightly dated. Understandably, the author has not opted for a fullscale rewrite of them; instead, in the Introduction Naish provides, where necessary, updates relating to the most pertinent recent developments. The transforming of the blog articles into book chapters has been done with fairly minimal editing, and the text thus contains occasional diary-style references to events which were current at the time of writing. These do seem somewhat out of place; it is slightly jarring to read about things that happened ‘last week’, and as a reader one has to constantly remind oneself of the fact that Naish originally published these texts in 2006. Personally, I would have preferred some slightly more extensive editing regarding such dates in the text. Alternatively, each chapter could have included information about the date when the article was originally published; surprisingly, such information is currently missing (hence, it is not clear to the reader if the articles are published in chronological order or not). When all is said and done, however, the abovementioned issues are fairly minor, and Tetrapod zoology book one can without hesitation be recommended to anyone with an interest in zoology. Overall, Darren Naish’s articles are a successful mix of the entertaining and the informative. And, as he has been steadily producing new entries for Tet Zoo ever since 2006, we are also entitled to hope that more of his blog article compilation books will eventually be forthcoming.

Reference Henderson DM, Naish D. 2010. Predicting the buoyancy, equilibrium and potential swimming ability of giraffes by computational analysis. J Theor Biol. 265:151–159.

Henry Pihlstro¨m Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland henry.pihlstrom@helsinki.fi q 2011, Henry Pihlstro¨m