Vertebrate palaeontology(3rd edition)

M. J. BENTON

Publisher Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004 (455 pp.).£29.95. ISBN: 0 632 05637 1

History of Life (4th edition)R. COWEN

Publisher Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004 (324 pp.).£32.50. ISBN: 1 4051 1756 7

These two popular textbooks are both published by Blackwelland must therefore be written for very different audiences. Thisis indeed the case as Cowen’s book covers an awful lot ofground very quickly, a fact that the author acknowledges inthe preface, whilst Benton’s is a much more scholarly tome,containing detailed illustrations of many of the major pointsin the text.Cowen’s book is called History of Life yet it concentrates on

vertebrate evolution, so passing entomologists, plant scientistsor microbial ecologists will be disappointed. From a Quatern-ary viewpoint, it also has little to offer, as only the last 76 pagesare taken up with vertebrate evolution from the Palaeocene tothe Holocene. This does not leave a lot of room for detail, butthe main story is there and the annotated reading lists are veryuseful, containing many of the popular science books I have onmy shelves. The book is aimed squarely at the ‘intelligent non-specialist’ with references confined to journals and books thatmay be available in large public libraries. The most annoyingthing I found was that the text is peppered with items in boldthat are not explained, presumably they meant to be in the glos-sary, which is online, this means that reading it anywhere with-out access to a PC can (and did) prove annoying. Even moreannoyingly, when I did have access to a PC, the website con-taining the glossary, interactive quizzes, etc., which is one ofthe big selling points of the book, simply repeats the informa-tion on the back cover and contains half a single interactivequiz and a list of contents which directs you to the author’swebsite (the URL of which is mis-typed in the book). Theauthor’s website contains a partial glossary and further infor-mation and reading, largely an annotated list of links to otherpeople’s websites, but overall a useful guide to work readilyavailable on the web. Most pages have also been changedwithin the last 6 months, indicating that there is some attemptto keep it up-to-date. The third (2000) edition possessed aninternal glossary, and had more room to explain concepts in432 pages. On occasion the text of the fourth edition left meconfused and, looking at the third edition, it is easy to seewhere sentences and paragraphs have been edited, removingmuch of the information from some sections.The book is designed to capture the reader’s interest, but

occasional throwaway comments leave you wanting moreinformation. This is particularly true in the second to last chap-ter on human evolution, where sites are referred to as ‘a Span-ish Cave’ rather than Atapuerca, or ‘Georgia’ rather thanDmanisi. I am all for simplification to get ideas and messagesacross, but I could not see why the site names were notincluded. It would certainly allow the reader to Google it moreeffectively! The chapter on megafaunal extinction and theoverkill hypothesis would make a great seminar starting pointfor students. For human evolution I would be more inclined tosend them to Klein (1999) or any one of a number of other, bet-

ter (but substantially longer) texts. The statement in figure cap-tion 21.9 that with the exception of the upper canine the sabre-toothed cat Smilodon is proportionally the same as a small catof the genus Felis is just wrong. There is a suite of features thatmake sabre-toothed cats different to modern cats—not just thecanines. That said, this is the only book I have found whichcontains limericks and the one about Gomphotheres on page306 is particularly good. One downside is that, as the authorsays, he has written in several places on only one side of theargument, and suggests that it’s the lecturer’s job to tell the stu-dents why he is wrong or one-sided. This is all very well, butstudents have a nasty habit of discounting anything if it doesnot agree with their book.Benton’s book is a very different beast, filled with phyloge-

nies, morphologies and dentaries. It is a book for someone whois already interested but needs to know more about a particulargroup. Things that are hinted at in Cowen are explained in Ben-ton, but then there are more pages, more citations in the textand a much wider array of journals to choose from. There isa short but useful glossary in the text (which is tangible ratherthan Cowen’s online version), although some words seem tohave been missed out when the glossary was compiled (assum-ing that the words in bold in the text are meant to be in the glos-sary, this is not made clear). Overall it covers a lot of material ina digestible way although I would not want to sit down to readall of it for fun. Different classes are in different chapters—birds, mammals, fishes, etc.—with the evolution of each,beginning from the first fossils of each group through to the pre-sent day. This is in contrast to the History of Life, which pro-ceeds through time with occasional digressions for theoriesand biogeography. Vertebrate Palaeontology is not trying togive all the background—for example Milankovitch cyclesare mentioned in passing on page 62, whilst Cowen makes astab at describing and discussing them in Chapter 21. Benton’sbook is very much more fossil-focused and recent moleculardata are integrated with morphological analyses, with areasof controversy highlighted.The only thing that jarred with me when reading it was the

use of Praeanthropus rather than Australopithecus for East Afri-can hominins. This suggestion has been mooted by a number ofauthors who are cited in the text, but thus far this nomenclaturehas not been taken up by the palaeoanthropological commu-nity. While I understand that if no-one uses new terms they willnever be accepted, I feel that an undergraduate textbook is notthe place to start using it. However, to be fair, the section isboth prefaced and ended with statements saying it is controver-sial; but if the terminology has to be used, I think it deserved atleast a box to explain the ins and outs of the argument.The online documentation exists, with artwork available for

downloading from the Blackwell website and a collection oferrata, full listed weblinks for each chapter and an online clas-sification of vertebrate phyla available on a personal website.The weblinks are a particularly useful idea, as I had thoughtwhile reading the text how vexing it would be to type in someof the massive URLs.Benton’s book is of better quality in terms of illustrations,

with many that would make suitable OHPs for lectures. Thosein the History of Life have suffered from being digitised withdistinct pixelisation in many places. One of the most myster-ious things therefore, is why Cowen’s book is the more expen-sive of the two. It is shorter, has poorer illustrations andcontains less information. Given the choice I would have Ben-ton on the shelf as a reference work, and recommend it to final-year undergraduates. I enjoyed reading Cowen’s but am put offby the price for the amount of information it contains. If themissing online information appears then I would recommendit to interested sixth-formers, foundation students and first-year

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208 BOOK REVIEWS

undergraduates with little background knowledge. If it remainsmissing, then I would advise people who really want it to tryand get hold of the earlier edition.

Reference

Klein RG. 1999. The Human Career. University of Chicago Press:Chicago.

HANNAH O’REGANResearch Centre in Evolutionary

Anthropology and PalaeoecologySchool of Biological & Earth Sciences

Liverpool John Moores UniversityLiverpool, UK

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com).

DOI: 10.1002/jqs.965

Monitoring the Earth. Physicalgeology in action

C. VITA-FINZI.

Publisher Terra, Harpenden, 2003. 189 pp. £19.95.ISBN 1-903544-12-2.

This is a novel, interesting and thought-provoking book aboutthe impact of new technology upon the traditional scope ofphysical geology. Vita-Finzi’s central point is that it has nowbecome possible to measure the effects of many geological pro-cesses as they occur, and that this should provoke a change inoutlook as to what the scope or even the purpose of physicalgeology is and might become.To put this claim into perspective, let us go back a long way.

Here is Archibald Geikie in 1887, illustrating the fact that theprocess of erosion by glaciers can be observed almost directly:

. . . let the observer transport himself in imagination to thewest coast of Norway. His first impression there will prob-ably be almost one of doubt whether he has really quittedthe Scottish shores, so precisely similar in their essentialfeatures, and even in their details, are those of WesternScandinavia. As he ascends one of the fjords, he sees aroundhim the same smoothed and polished islets, the same flowingoutlines on all the lower hills, and the same craggy crestsagainst the sky. But at the far head of the winding inlet, hewill find that, in the northern part of Norway, the sea-filledvalley passes inland into a deep glen, down the centre ofwhich a glacier creeps, while snow-fields descend to thevery edges of the precipices all around. He will discover thatthe smoothed rock-surfaces pass under the glacier, andhe may then, as it were, catch the ice in the very act ofproducing them.

(The Scenery of Scotland, 2nd edn, p. 83, 1887; italics mine.)

For all its immediacy, this description still uses the classicalgeological methodology of observing form and inferring pro-cess. Transporting the reader to a glacier is really just a forcefulrhetorical trick. At that time no measurements had been madeon the process itself, nor had any glacier beds been monitoredto demonstrate the grinding and scratching as they actuallytook place. It has since proved relatively easy, though oftenvery laborious, actually to measure denudation processes,and enormous efforts have been devoted between Geikie’stime and ours to quantifying ice, rivers, winds and sea in their‘very acts’. Monitoring processes and the denudation fluxesthey produce became a major strand in terrestrial geomorphol-ogy, which by the end of the 20th century had advanced to thepoint at which the shapes of landforms could be mathemati-cally deduced or numerically modelled from process in a mod-erately convincing fashion, a neat reversal of earlier reasoning.

Denudation fluxes are much easier to observe in real timethan the changes in landscape they produce. Historical com-parisons do reveal change, but depend on documentary evi-dence from the past such as maps, photographs or detailedaccounts. Changes themselves tend to be either episodic orrare, and thus easy to miss if observations are haphazard intime, or so slowly cumulative in their effects that they areimperceptible unless measured extremely precisely. All this istrue of geomorphology, but it is even more the case for theEarth’s internally driven processes—earthquakes and faulting,crustal deformation, uplift and subsidence, mantle convection,continental drift, or instability at the core–mantle boundary.Here is Geikie again:

In speculating, however, from ascertained facts as to whatmay be or what has been the history of a land-surface, weare of course bound to take into consideration the effect ofsubterranean movements in modifying changes at the sur-face. . . . It is certain that in the geological past there havebeen many uplifts, by which the solid terrestrial crust hasbeen plicated and fractured on a colossal scale. Such a chainof mountains as the Alps, for instance, exhibits proofs of stu-pendous inversions and folds, whole mountainous masses ofrock having there been thrown over bottom uppermost. Butwhile the proofs of prodigious displacements are so clear, itis by no means so evident how they affected the surface ofthe ground at the time . . . . This is a question which oughtnot to be merely guessed at.

(Ibid., pp. 92–93; italics mine.)

Vita-Finzi shows that it is now possible, 120 years later, to mea-sure the deformation of the ground produced over wide areasby individual earthquakes that episodically contribute to the‘prodigious displacements’ that are still slowly accumulatingtoday. The dynamism of the Earth’s crust, that for so long couldonly be inferred from its effects, is now susceptible to monitor-ing on local, regional and global scales. The movement of tec-tonic plates has been determined in real time, over only adecade, and found to match closely with the rates inferred fromthe originally wholly geologically recorded evidence.This shift in the limits of the actively observable has taken

place in the last two decades and derives from a fundamentalchange in the basis on which time, and lapse of time, are bothmeasured. Until the mid-20th century, the most accurateclocks still relied upon a swinging pendulum to regulate them.They gained or lost about 5 milliseconds per day and had to bekept fixed, under controlled conditions. The replacement of thependulum by a vibrating quartz crystal first, and later by reso-nance frequencies in atoms of caesium, raised the precisionwith which lapse of time could be measured to 0.1 microse-conds per day, or about one part in 1012. Quartz crystals areextremely portable, as every wearer of a modern watch knows,and quartz clocks are now a component of most electronicequipment, including devices that use electromagnetic radia-tion to measure distance. These find the phase shift between

Copyright � 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Quaternary Sci., Vol. 21(2) 206–210 (2006)

BOOK REVIEWS 209