FOREWORD
Professor and Canada Research Chair
of Dinosaur Paleobiology, University of Alberta
I was only 6 years old when I “dug up” my first dinosaur from the inside of a cereal box. The plastic model inspired my imagination in a powerful way that led to regular visits to the dinosaur galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. Several times a week, I would go to Sixteen Mile Creek near my home to scramble up and down the cliffs of Ordovician sediments, collecting marine invertebrate fossils while I fantasized about discovering dinosaurs. I read (and reread) every book that was available to me about any fossils from anywhere. After reading All about Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews when I was 11 years old, I knew that I wanted to be a dinosaur hunter. Such is the power of the written word. Unfortunately, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were relatively few printed words to meet my insatiable appetite for detailed information on dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were popular with the public, but little scientific research was being done on them. As a substitute, I filled in the void by reading comic books, science fiction stories, and anything else that even remotely mentioned a dinosaur.
Scientific research on dinosaurs reached a watershed in 1962 when a young scientist named John Ostrom discovered specimens of a small meat-eating dinosaur in Montana. The discovery went virtually unnoticed at first, but when his influential publication naming Deinonychus antirrhopus appeared in 1969, things really started to happen. An article by Robert T. Bakker in Scientific American in 1975 made it official with its title: “Dinosaur Renaissance.”
Throughout the 1970s, publication of scientific papers increased every year, and popular books kept in step with the new dinosaur discoveries. In 1976, I took my first job as a dinosaur collector and researcher for the Provincial Museum of Alberta in Edmonton. My influences were many, but one book published in 1977 in particular characterized my approach. A Vanished World: The Dinosaurs of Western Canada by Dale A. Russell, illustrated with magnificent paintings by Eli Kish and spectacular photos by Susanne Swibold, integrated a broad spectrum of sciences to bring the dinosaurian world to life. A curator at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (now the Canadian Museum of Nature) in Ottawa, Russell was ahead of his time in developing multidisciplinary research programs. I followed his lead in the creation of the curatorial and research programs and the displays of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller.
It is difficult to assess the importance of any single publication. There are books that I consider poor in terms of scientific accuracy and presentation. Yet, if any of these books captures the imagination of even one person, who am I to complain? On the other hand, many good books have been written about dinosaurs in recent years. Some that I have considered excellent have gone out of print in record time and have probably had little influence on the public perception of our profession. Others are narrowly focused but fill a valuable niche. But I have never seen another volume that is as broad-based, inclusive, and multidisciplinary as Russell’s book. At least, not until I read Scott Sampson’s Dinosaur Odyssey.
Dinosaur Odyssey looks not just at dinosaurs but also at the myriad life-forms that shared their ecosystems, from bacteria to birds. This is done deliberately to show how life-forms interact to form complex, interdependent systems. But Dinosaur Odyssey goes beyond Russell’s book by exploring the science of paleontology alongside the dynamic world of dinosaurs.
I first met the author of this book more than 20 years ago when he was an undergraduate student. Even then, it was evident that Scott Sampson would become a noteworthy dinosaur paleontologist. His interests were broad, and like a kid in a candy shop, he found it difficult to focus on a single direction. Luckily, Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies had an ideal project that encompassed the description of two new species of horned dinosaurs. Not content to just name the animals and work out their relationships, Scott pushed the boundaries to try to unravel the aspects of their biology that made them so unique. The resulting doctoral thesis was exemplary and led to the publication of several influential papers.
One of the most successful and fascinating groups of animals that ever evolved, dinosaurs are the heart and soul of this book. Scott has succeeded in translating their history into an epic tale. They appeared late in the Triassic and dominated the planet for all of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. In fact, their living descendants—birds—are still more diverse than mammals. Residing on the same branch of the family tree as dinosaurs, birds number more than 10,000 species, compared with 6,000 species of reptiles and amphibians, and 4,000 species of mammals. Nevertheless, these living dinosaurs are numerically overwhelmed by fish, insects, and other groups of organisms.
Although dinosaurs dominated the Mesozoic world by virtue of their size and diversity, they were likewise overwhelmed by smaller denizens. Like us, they were pestered by mosquitoes, flies, and ticks. And while many people assume that mammals did not exist or were rare as long as dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there always would have been many more furballs around than giant dinosaurs. Certain ecosystems were likely home to a greater diversity of mammals than of dinosaurs. Mammals were common enough for small dinosaurs like Sinosauropteryx to hunt and eat (as we know because one specimen of this remarkable little feathered dinosaur from northeastern China has two mammals in its stomach). Was it always the mammals that got picked on? Apparently not, because from the same part of the world a dogsized mammal known as Repenomamus was discovered with baby dinosaurs in its stomach!
The interactions between dinosaurs, mammals, and all other forms of life comprise a major theme of this book. Evolution and extinction require that the actors in the theater of life are always changing, but fundamentally the play has remained constant. Dinosaurs put on some of the most spectacular versions of “the play of life” during Mesozoic times, and if we hope to understand and learn from their performances, we clearly need to be good understudies.
This book succeeds admirably in showing how the study of dinosaurs is approached by paleontologists today and in documenting the state of this popular science early in the twenty-first century. Exciting aspects of dinosaurian biology are opening up through the use of new tools and techniques by highly creative people. Dinosaur Odyssey will not be the final word on dinosaurs, nor does it aspire to be. As much as we know about these animals, there is so much more that we need to learn. Thousands of species remain to be discovered, among which will undoubtedly be forms bizarre enough to surprise even the most experienced dinosaur hunters.
Teachers from kindergarten to graduate school have long realized that our fascination with dinosaurs makes them an effective vehicle for communicating the nature of deep time, the epic of evolution, and the inevitability of extinction. Few general books on dinosaurs incorporate a more readable, integrated approach than that employed by Scott Sampson. He writes engagingly, telling personal stories of relevance and interest and adding a dash of humor throughout. Given its marvelous breadth of content, I think that Dinosaur Odyssey is the best general-audience dinosaur book since the Dinosaur Renaissance began in the 1970s. It is exactly the kind of book that I would have liked to write, covering much of the same material that I use in one of my university courses. The approach is perfect: teach biological (and to a lesser extent geological) ideas by using dinosaurs as a hook. This is not an introduction to dinosaurs as much as it is a book to take the reader deeper into the subject, exploring some of the most important questions that paleontologists address, and describing implications that reach far beyond simply naming the biggest or most bizarre species. Indeed, Dinosaur Odyssey places dinosaurs into context with an evolving planet. It will entice many into thinking about the importance of nature (particularly evolution and ecology, the origin of life, and the inevitability of extinction). In his juxtaposition of past and present, Scott Sampson has made it clear that understanding the ancient world of the dinosaurs is more relevant than ever as we struggle to cope with climate change and extinction in our fast-moving, constantly evolving world.