Most children go through a dinosaur phase. Learning all the tongue twisting names, picking favorites based on ferocity, armor, or sheer size. For many kids this love of ‘terrible lizards’ fizzles out at some point between starting and leaving primary school. All those fancy names slowly forgotten, no longer any need for a favorite.
For all those child dino fanatics who didn’t grow up to become paleontologists, dinosaurs seem like something out of mythology. They are dragons, pictures in books, abstract, other, extinct.
They are at the same time familiar and mysterious. And yet we’re in an age of rapid discovery—new dinosaur species and genera are being discovered at an accelerating rate, we’re learning more about what they looked like, how they lived, how they evolved and where they all went.
This series isn’t just a top trumps list of dino facts—we’re interested in the why and the how and like all areas of science there is plenty of controversy and debate.
Dinosaurier-Wissen reizt mich immer; ich finde dieses Thema und alles, was nur irgendwie damit zu tun hat, einfach total spannend. So konnte mich auch "Dinosaurier im Kopfhörer" packen; ich habe viel gelernt :)
A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs by Ben Garrod and narrated by author is a book that sparked the kid in me again! Who doesn't love dinosaurs? My youngest son answered the question of how old he was with, "I two year old dinosaur!" The next year he was a 3 year old dinosaur, by the next year he was, "I am four years old and I have a dinosaur. " He told everyone he was going to be a paleontologist. Most people just looked at me for help, they weren't getting any. This book brought back that fun! Going to the museums, looking at the time of books, watching Jurassic Park and wearing out two tapes! It went into all the things kids want to know, how big do they get, do some really have feathers, how did some live after the big event that killed them, what did kill them, what's it like to dig for bones, how many mass extinctions have there been, and yes we are about to lose 1 million species now starting the sixth mass extinction! Can we stop it in time? Are we one of the ones to go? How many have to go extinct before we do something, and will it be to late by then? This was a book of good thought and thoughts that everybody needs to be thinking. Great book! Wish it had been longer
This well-produced audiobook was both fun and educational. I was fascinated by dinosaurs as a child, and I remember borrowing stacks of books on them from the library. In my grown-up years, I've been a big Jurassic Park fan (both books and movies).
Back when I was a kid, no one knew that many dinosaurs had feathers. Or that today's birds are basically small dinosaurs!
While I enjoyed the audiobook, what I really need is an illustrated book so I can see the dinosaurs and how all their names are spelled.
My favorite dinosaur is still the T. Rex, and my second favorite is the Triceratops.
I had no expectations for this book and I just wanted a quick audiobook, but I was surprised by how much I liked this one. It felt like a quick Discovery channel documentary about dinosaurs. I never had a dinosaur phase in my life so all of the information in this was new to me. Sometimes the scientific terms and facts would go over my head a little bit but overall I enjoyed this audiobook.
This was my husband’s choice for what we listened to together so I didn’t know what to expect from it since he got it for free. I liked this listen but it wasn’t my favorite audiobook.
The last 3 chapters were the ones I liked the most as those topics interested me a lot (female paleontologists, aquatic and mammal creatures, and what dinosaurs could eat are a few examples) but the first 3 took a bit for me to get into. All were interesting with interviews from specialists in their field throughout the listen. This experience felt like I was listening to a podcast, which was different but nice for a short trip.
I’d definitely say it was worth free but I can see how some might not love it since listeners who don’t know certain creatures by name might need to stop and look them up to understand what the speakers are taking about.
First love of when I was a kid= dinosaurs and the second was flying unicorns. Not much has changed except now I like the Phoenix too. Two of these are mythical. One ... all real. This was insightful and entertaining and worth the choice of originals that month.
A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs was a real delight to listen to. It's an Audible exclusive that was offered for free a while back, so I picked it up and ended up listening to it twice. It's only two and a half hours, and plays like a short podcast series. It's all about re-engaging with your childhood love of dinosaurs, recapturing that child-like focus on collecting details, and updating our understanding from the days and craze of Jurassic Park, where most people left off. You'll get fun discussions with experts about just how omnipresent feathers were, why dinosaurs are still well represented on our planet, how the famous K-T extinction occurred, how large dinosaurs were able to get, which dinosaur was the largest (and why that is controversial), and much, much more. Worth a listen!
This was a fun audiobook (and free) to have for my commute during my Prague-Spain trip. It was educational and while I am a self declared nerd, I do not really have any favorite dinosaurs.
You have some of the world’s leading paleontologists and evolutionary biologists explaining the nature of dinosaurs, their evolution, the diet, their build, and the strategies with which they’ve approached their research to derive the information that we have today. It helps us map the transition of organisms to what we see in the ecosystems today. I highly recommend this book.
Fun fact: Dinosaurs aren’t extinct. Take a look at your garden variety chicken and you’re looking at a relic of ancient history.
This was targeted at adults who outgrew their "dinosaur phase" but wanted to hear the latest research on dinos, so it was a fun listen for everyone who ever loved dinosaurs as a kid. The narrator interviews several paleontologists, asks everyone who their favorite dinosaur is (with some good-natured joking about the inevitable layman's answer, "T-Rex" or "Velociraptor") and talks a lot about the various geological epochs in which dinosaurs lived, and why pteranodons and icythosaurs aren't dinosaurs but chickens are.
I enjoyed it, but it wasn't meant to be very deep and it isn't. Most of us already know that birds evolved from dinosaurs, that dinosaurs had feathers, and that some dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded. This has been pretty common knowledge since the 90s. They also go a bit into what Jurassic Park got wrong (it seems every paleontologist loves Jurassic Park while just wishing they could have been a bit more... scientific), and some early dinosaur enthusiasts who shaped the field today, as well as a dick-measuring contest still going on today over who's discovered the biggest dinosaur. Turns out figuring out how big any given beast actually was is not very straightforward when you're just working off of a couple of fossilized bones.
Definitely worth the 2+ hours of time investment. I enjoyed learning a little more about some more recent discoveries about dinosaurs, getting into some of the "feathers" discoveries, etc. Of course, you can't have a dinosaur book without mentioning Jurassic Park and also pointing out that they got the velociraptors all wrong.
First, I think this is why I have a hard time with non-fiction and stick with fantasy/scifi, I will never understand how people studying a thing we've never actually seen, who also have discovered things like the fact that dinosaurs had disproportionately sized babies, that there's an argument over how to actually measure the size of a certain dinosaur based on proportionalities we use with current animals, and yet be SO ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENT in what they are saying as if there is no other way this could be...
and we're still going to point out that now we understand that dinosaurs had feathers. Completely changing our view of dinosaurs.
Second, Jurassic Park was splicing other genes into the dinosaurs they created so they can really never be held to any strict standards, which I think is a pretty genius way to have described the science.
I'm glad to have read this and learned more about dinosaurs and don't get me wrong, you can describe science and be pretty confident. But show some humility, some acknowledgment that hey, we've been wrong before so this may be disproven in a week.
Really loved this! It was super interesting, but it only whet my appetite on the subject. I know want to dig deeper into how different dinosaurs of today are compared to what I remembered.
It's incredible to hear how scientists have investigated and discovered the evolution of dinosaurs and ancient reptiles.
This is another free book I heard because I'm a member of Audible and this was free. And about dinosaurs.
I've not had much luck getting myself into listening to books. A few things here or there I've liked. Mostly nonfiction. And mostly because it is hard for me to pay attention, not have my mind wander. Then I'll have no idea what's going on because I'm not picking up everything. Also doesn't help that I have trouble telling characters apart if there is just one narrator.
Well this here is nonfiction, and while there's just one name attached to it (writer and narrator), many other people came by to talk to Ben about dinosaurs. Truthfully, this really felt like a show on TV wherein I was just getting the audio. I'm fairly certain that some of the 'other' voices (unless Ben is basically the best ever at doing multiple voices) actually said things like 'as you can see here' and the like. To Ben, but I'm hearing it in an audio book so . . . what am I supposed to be seeing?
Anyway, this is a short couple of hours about dinosaurs. How they had feathers. How the dinos in Jurassic Park, the film, were misnamed. How the 'Velociraptors', actually 'Deinonychus', had feathers in real life. Oh, and were actually not Velociraptors. Hard to tell what exactly they looked like feathered, though, unlike today's birds, feathered dinosaurs show evidence of having feathers on their legs and having their balance supported by their muscular tails (todays birds have tails, but made out of feathers; oh, and, as I already knew, today's birds are dinos).
Also there was some stuff about dino skeletons found throughout time. Differing theories of differing things. Oh, and how mammals that lived along side dinos millions of years ago tend to get depicted as these cowering mice like creatures. Evidence has found, though, that there were a lot more variation in mammals of the time - some that were fox like and were found with dinosaurs in their stomachs (as in the fox ate a dinosaur, not that a dino ate into a fox through stomach).
This was a surprisingly good and entertaining audiobook. I actually learned some interesting facts about current paleontology and things that the archeologists have been working on, both in their digs and their research. They talked about how dinosaurs evolved to exist and changed from small ones to the huge ones. Then they also discussed what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and the five mass extinction events that have happened on earth so far. They discussed the sixth one that is currently happening now to all of us. They discussed which dinosaur ancestors remain today, and how birds are related to the dinosaurs. There were so many other facts covered and it was all very interesting. I really enjoyed this free audiobook novella!
Did you love reading about dinosaurs as a kid and wish there was a similarly exciting resource written for adults? This is great!
I was definitely fascinated with dinosaurs as a kid, but the book aptly explains how many kids sort of grow out of this as they age. It was also really neat to hear about some common misconceptions that people have, especially with the new dino discoveries and research that have happened since the 90s.
It's a quick listen, but informative and was the perfect Audible freebie!
"The ____'s Guide to _____ a/and ______" Accountability Rating: I have decided to start holding books accountable for frivolously using the extremely overused title construction this book also uses. This book gets an 10/10. It is an actual guide to dinosaurs for grown-ups! Absolutely 100% ratio of title accuracy to contents of book. No notes.
Alternate Titles for This Book: No alternate titles needed.
For someone who repeatedly watched The Land Before Time as a kid, it turns out that I do not care about dinosaurs. Read via audio (narrated by Ben Garrod).
Who didn't want to be a paleontologist as a kid? Especially my generation who grew up on Jurassic Park! This was a wonderful refresher for grown-ups that was fun. It wasn't a boring list of dinos, but an exploration that makes you want to grab a brush and a pick and get digging!
This was a delightful audible book; educational and entertaining.
I'm an avid dinosaur fan and I still learnt some new things. I particularly appreciated the wide range of different experts consulted, on a vast array of different topics, to present a vivid and holistic view of the dinosaurs' time on Earth.
I also loved hearing about Mary Anning and the paleontologists of the past.
Definitely recommend if you can't get enough of dinosaurs!
I really enjoyed this audiobook by Audible audio about the dinosaurs and how they evolved. It is a quick fun listen, and it talks about the sixth extinction (man) and how we are walking right into our own demise. The production of greenhouse gases, and other toxins, is affecting a lot of species now, and killing off those species is leading us down a path.
Yes, I'm one of those people who was planning to become a paleontologist when I was a teenager. This audiobook caught my full attention from the first second until the last. Amazing what has been discovered about dinosaurs since I changed my career choice to something more mundane!
First off - this isn't really a book despite how Audible packages, this comes off more as if it were supposed to be a 6 episode limited radio series (the author repeatedly refers to things mentioned at the beginning of the program) and this contains a number of interviews with other scientists.
But it's definitely a great listen. Ben Garrod (an evolutionary biologist) is a great guide, and this really is a reminder of how cool dinosaurs are (though, frankly it left me wanting to learn about other now extinct animals too). Or maybe not so much a reminder, per se--because a lot of what is in this work isn't the kind of stuff that I'd learned or come close to learning when I was a kid obsessed with dinosaurs (and not just because paleontology has moved on, though it definitely has).
I won't go through all the awesome stuff I learned though (fortunately I had someone willing to listen to get that desire out of my system). There is one thing I just have to pick on, though. Garrod asks a number of people "what's you're favorite dinosaur" (mine may now be the Magyarosaurus which is an island dwarf--despite being a member of the clade Titanosauria which contains the largest known dinosaurs, was an island dwarf about the the size of a horse - I never really wanted a horse growing up, but I'd kinda like one of those). One of the scientists he asks the question of responds that his favorite dinosaur is the chicken. I get the point that birds are dinosaurs (and I may have spent a good part of a hike after listening to that section listening and looking for dinosaurs) but, really, I feel like the chicken is a poor choice for favorite bird. Or maybe it's a reasonable choice, but I'd atleast like to have known why--is there something very dinosaur like about chickens? Maybe some similarities to one of it's closest non-avian dinosaur relatives the velociratpor (which was actually the size of a mini poodle, so not much bigger, though definitely more ferocious than a chicken)
I think my expectations were too high for this free Audible Original. I was really "into" dinosaurs as a kid, though I subsequently came to understand a lot of what I had learned was simply wrong (did the Brontosaurus ever actually exist?). I figured this short guide would be really interesting. I liked it, but even so it was somewhat of a letdown.
There was some good material. I was surprised to hear that two paleontologists are at odds over which one discovered the biggest (heaviest) dinosaur in history. Was it Dreadnoughtus or the Titanosaur? (great names!) Apparently there are multiple ways to estimate mass, they produce different results, and scientists aren't above squabbling over this kind of thing.
I also didn't realize we now believe birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs. Regardless of the pictures I remember as a kid, T Rex apparently has more in common with a Rhode Island Red than with a Komodo Dragon. It's all very confusing when science changes so dramatically. Perhaps in another 30 years, we'll realize everything contained in this audiobook was also incorrect.
This was a fairly interesting short presentation. Author and presenter Ben Garrod is an English evolutionary biologist, primatologist and broadcaster. He is Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, since 2019, according to his Wikipedia page.
Ben Garrod:
A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs is presented in an audio format. It is 6 episodes; each ~30mins long. The episodes are: Ep.1 - What Is a Dinosaur Ep.2 - Size Matters Ep.3 - Feathered Freaks Ep.4 - Who Needs Bones Ep.5 - What Is Not a Dinosaur Ep.6 - The Fall of the Dinosaurs
Although I found this series interesting, the audio format is probably not the ideal presentation. There is much talk here of dinosaur morphology that could have used illustrations to help give the reader a better picture. 3.5 stars.
Even though this is being sold as a "book" you can clearly tell it's more of a compilation of podcasts or some other episodic series. However, this doesn't take away from the overall recording. If anything, it gives clear "chapter breaks" in the information.
Definitely a great digest explanation of dinosaurs.