Book review – In the Circle of Ancient Trees: Our Oldest Trees and the Stories They Tell

8-minute read
keywords: dendrochronology, trees

Six years ago, Belgian dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet blew me away with Tree Story, making it onto my year-end list with her account of research on tree rings. To be honest, I was not sure how she could top that book, and maybe she was not either. For her latest book, released autumn last year, she has thus taken on the role of editor to let her colleagues tell you first-hand of their research. In a nicely balanced collection of essays that features long-lived trees from around the globe, ten senior dendrochronologists provide ten different and sometimes personal answers to the question: “And what else can you learn from tree rings?”

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Year list – The Inquisitive Biologist’s top 5 reads of 2025

3-minute read

2025 was a year in which I managed to read and review 32 books. What follows is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful, and most thought-provoking books I read this year.

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Book review – The Desert Bones: The Paleontology and Paleoecology of Mid-Cretaceous North Africa

9-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, paleontology

Having just reviewed The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, I next wanted a more current overview of our palaeontological knowledge of North Africa. So, to conclude this impromptu trio of reviews, I turned to British palaeobiologist Jamale Ijouiher’s 2022 The Desert Bones. Offering a meticulous and exhaustive overview of the often fragmentary material found throughout this region, The Desert Bones brings to life North Africa during the Mid-Cretaceous: a time of wetlands, rudist reefs and, of course, spinosaurs.

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Book review – The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt

9-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, paleontology

Having just reviewed the recent Spinosaur Tales, there was one aspect to the history of this dinosaur that I found particularly intriguing: the discovery of Spinosaurus in Egypt in 1912, and the subsequent destruction of the fossils during an air raid in World War II. One name thus kept coming up time and again: that of German palaeontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach (Ernst Stromer for short). It is an unbelievable bit of history that has all the ingredients for a remarkable book, which, it just so happens, was written back in 2002. Given that I bought a copy of this book five years ago, this is the perfect excuse for an unplanned detour, going back to the 2000s for a joint American-Egyptian fossil hunting expedition, and even further back, to the Egypt of the 1910s.

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Book review – Spinosaur Tales: The Biology and Ecology of the Spinosaurs

9-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, evolutionary biology, paleontology

When I reviewed Witton’s King Tyrant earlier this year, I mentioned not minding if we get more books that give a detailed overview of specific dinosaur groups. Almost as if in answer to that wish, Spinosaur Tales was announced. These fish-eating and sail-backed (well, some of them) predatory dinosaurs are as enigmatic as they are controversial, and writing a book about them means navigating both fragmentary remains and strongly held opinions. So, who better to tackle this challenge than two of the best names in the business? Riffing on the title of Hone’s previous book with Bloomsbury Sigma, The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, this thoughtful book brings together palaeontologists Dave Hone and Mark P. Witton to discuss everything we do and do not know about spinosaurs.

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Book review – The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs: Unearthing the Real Behaviors of Prehistoric Animals

7-minute read
keywords: ethology, fossils, paleontology

Back in 2021, palaeontologist Dean Lomax impressed me with Locked in Time, a popular science book that looked at the behaviour of extinct animals as revealed by a selection of extraordinary fossils. Showing that there is more to be said on the topic, he now returns with The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs, which features another tranche of remarkable fossils. More than just a sequel, though, this book improves on its predecessor in several respects.

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Book review – Edgar Allan Poe: A Life

15-minute read
keywords: biography, literature

Next to an abiding interest in biology, I also have a penchant for the gothic, and a version of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe naturally can be found in my library. But beyond the author of The Raven, who was Poe? One man who can tell me is Richard Kopley, a Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the Penn State DuBois campus of Pennsylvania State University. When this biography was published back in March, I made a mental note to revisit it for Halloween. Though my background is in biology, Kopley fortunately wants to provide for a broad readership, including “the general reader, the aficionado, and the scholar”, the goal being to “get as close to Poe as I can for as many readers as I can” (p. 4). Thus, for the last 21 days, I have immersed myself in this detailed and deeply researched biography to read of a life that was both captivating and tragic.

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Book review – Lechuguilla Cave: Discoveries in a Hidden Splendor

8-minute read
keywords: caves, geology, speleology

Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico would be a dead ringer for one of the Seven Wonders of the World, if only the authors of that bucket list had known of its existence earlier. I read about this cave recently while reviewing Onstott’s Deep Life, where it was mentioned as an example of caves forming in unusual ways. While doing some more background research, I came across this book that, though published in 2022, had thus far escaped my attention. Edited by geoscientists Max Wisshak and Hazel A. Barton, it combines a mouth-watering photographic portfolio with a series of informative essays to share this cave’s spectacular beauty with the wider world.

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Book review – Mesozoic Art II: Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals in Art

8-minute read
keywords: dinosaurs, paleoart, paleontology

When I reviewed the palaeoart portfolio Mesozoic Art back in 2022, I was expecting we might see a second volume another five years down the line. We did not have to wait that long. Comic book editor, writer, and artist Steve White and palaeozoologist Darren Naish team up once again to bring you another lavish, large-format art book with the very best of current palaeoart. If you bought the previous volume, I am pleased to say that this book is more of the same, which is the best possible outcome one could hope for. It is also more of the same, as the book is bigger than its predecessor, featuring 25 artists that together span the full gamut from upcoming talent to seasoned veterans, and from cartoonish to photorealistic illustrations. Mesozoic Art II provides a balanced cross-section of jaw-dropping artwork that portrays not just dinosaurs, but also numerous other organisms that are less often depicted. If ever you needed proof that the palaeoart community has matured and is taking its craft seriously, this book is your ticket.

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Book review – The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution

9-minute read
keywords: paleontology, speculative zoology

What if the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had missed? What might today’s fauna look like then? These are the sorts of questions entertained by speculative zoology, biology’s version of the fiction genre of alternate history. It may seem whimsical, but that has not stopped some from earnestly engaging with this thought experiment and imagining how evolutionary processes could have resulted in different outcomes. Geologist and freelance author Dougal Dixon is widely credited with launching the modern speculative zoology movement with his 1981 book After Man. A facsimile was published in 2018 by Breakdown Press, and in my review of that reprint, I expressed the hope that some of Dixon’s later works would be similarly reissued. Fast forward to 2025, DinoCon, Exeter, where I collected in person from the legend himself the just-released facsimile of The New Dinosaurs, originally published in 1988. Was I like a giddy child in a candy store? And did I get my copy signed? Yes, dear reader, I was and I did.

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