Millions of years ago in the Cretaceous period, the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex--with its dagger-like teeth for tearing its prey to ribbons--was undoubtedly the fiercest carnivore to roam the Earth. Yet as What Bugged the Dinosaurs? reveals, T. rex was not the only killer. George and Roberta Poinar show how insects--from biting sand flies to disease-causing parasites--dominated life on the planet and played a significant role in the life and death of the dinosaurs.

The Poinars bring the age of the dinosaurs marvelously to life. Analyzing exotic insects fossilized in Cretaceous amber at three major deposits in Lebanon, Burma, and Canada, they reconstruct the complex ecology of a hostile prehistoric world inhabited by voracious swarms of insects. The Poinars draw upon tantalizing new evidence from their amazing discoveries of disease-producing vertebrate pathogens in Cretaceous blood-sucking flies, as well as intestinal worms and protozoa found in fossilized dinosaur excrement, to provide a unique view of how insects infected with malaria, leishmania, and other pathogens, together with intestinal parasites, could have devastated dinosaur populations.

A scientific adventure story from the authors whose research inspired Jurassic Park, What Bugged the Dinosaurs?? offers compelling evidence of how insects directly and indirectly contributed to the dinosaurs' demise.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 3 reviews)

What Bugged The Dinosaurs

If your main interest is paleoentomology, this might be a helpful reference. It was interesting to see some contemporary looking species in ancient amber. Disease undoubtedly affected the dinosaurs, but if you want to consider another reason why they most likely went extinct, this is not likely to persuade. It's also not engagingly written and it's too long...the point was made in the first chapter.
July 22, 2008

Thin skins

I never consciously thought about it, but I guess I assumed that dinosaurs had thick, tough hides, like a rhinoceros. Apparently not.
George and Roberta Poinar, whose research interest is what fossil amber can reveal about ancient insects, say dino skin "was surprisingly thin and reptilian." This makes a difference, because the point of "What Bugged the Dinosaurs?" is that "biting insects were the top predators in the food chain" during the Cretaceous, not T. rex.
Conveniently, amber deposits, with engulfed insects, exist at 20-million-year intervals from the Age of Terrible Lizards, er, Terrible Insects. The oldest is from Lebanon, the middle deposit from Burma and the youngest (still 75 million years old) from Canada.
The authors discuss how amber works, consider such questions as "did dinosaurs or insects 'invent' flowering plants?" and then illustrate different kinds of insects well-preserved in amber: biting midges, sand flies, mosquitoes, blackflies, horseflies and deerflies, fleas and lice, ticks and mites (not insects) and parasitic worms (also not insects).
They consider what diseases these insects could have transmitted to dinosaurs and, in the grand finale, make an argument that insects could have been big players in one or more mass extinctions, including the end of the dinosaurs.
They don't dismiss the idea of a killer giant meteor, but they ask, "Since insect species represent the majority of animal diversity, why haven't they ever been mentioned in most discussions of mass extinctions?"
And they conclude, "We believe that disease played a significant role in dinosaur extinction during the terminal Cretaceous."
The book is well-illustrated with large scale color pictures of insects (and nematodes and other assorted critters) in amber.
June 06, 2008

The Darker Side of Jurassic Park

Most dinosaur lovers will find this an interesting read, although a few of the reconstructions are not for the squeamish. In considering the heyday of the dinosaurs, books don't often mention that just like modern animals, they were tormented by the biting flies, mosquitoes and midges we find in amber today, weakened by parasites and fungus, and infected by lethal diseases carried by ticks, fleas and nematodes, some of which could have whittled down individual dinosaur populations beyond the point of recovery. Most people know that dragonflies and cockroaches have been around since before the dinosaurs, but the fact that the modern world's two deadliest infectious diseases, malaria and Leishmaniasis, were also around and may have killed off whole dinosaur herds was new to me. The Poinars don't carry their thesis quite to the point of claiming that parasites and disease were what ended the Age of the Dinosaurs, but they certainly present an alternate candidate worth thinking about.
January 22, 2008

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
by Neil Shubin

Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and Hard Science
by Phillip Manning

The Rise of Animals: Evolution and Diversification of the Kingdom Animalia
by Mikhail A. Fedonkin, James G. Gehling, Kathleen Grey, Guy M. Narbonne, Patricia Vickers-Rich
by Arthur C. Clarke

Fossil Ecosystems of North America: A Guide to the Sites and Their Extraordinary Biotas
by John R. Nudds, Paul A. Selden

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters
by Donald R. Prothero
by Carl Buell