Dinosaur Behavior: An Illustrated Guide
By Michael J. Benton
Princeton University Press 2023

Dinosaur Behavior, a big new illustrated volume from Princeton University Press and The Dinosaurs Rediscovered author Michael Benton, opens with a familiar melodramatic moment: “ T.rex crashes through the trees and leaps on a juvenile Triceratops. The huge predator has scaly skin and tufts of colorful feathers over its eyes; it crunches through the bones of the terrified herbivore with a force of several tons …” (The book’s cover helpfully illustrates the sad moment). 

“We are familiar with this kind of scene from the movies,” Benton writes, “but how much of it is guesswork?” 

That’s the central, animating question behind the unnumbered marvels in these pages (marvels brought to life by illustrator Bob Nicholas in color and black-and-white): how much of the kinds of things you see in any dinosaur book are just guesswork? When you look at the book’s illustrations showing dinosaurs traveling in packs or carefully guarding their clutches of eggs or simply standing around decked out in feathers and plumage, you naturally ask: how do scientists actually know any of that? 

Benton is a first-rate teacher, and he carefully and colorfully explains just exactly how much and how little guesswork is involved in producing the latest extrapolations about dinosaur life, biology, appearance, and behavior. And unless you’re a passionate amateur of the most extreme stripe, you’ll be amazed at the sheer extent of energetic thinking that has pieced together a long-gone world, even down to the specific colors of those dinosaur feathers: “All hairs colors in mammals are produced by melanin, as are many colors in bird feathers, and in these cases the melanin enters the hair or feathers from the site of production in the skin and is contained in a tiny structure called a melansome,” Benton writes. “Melansomes with eumelanin are sausage-shaped, those with pheomelanin are ball-shaped.”

By the end of the book, you’ll actually almost be understanding such passages – and you’ll certainly be imagining the world of dinosaurs in far more antic and unexpected attitudes than you ever did before. The besetting sin of all dinosaur books – the shortness of their shelf-life as more and more research piles up every week – will no doubt soon afflict this volume too, rendering some of its suppositions and all of its science look quaint. But for the moment, this is surely the most interesting rendition of the dinosaur world that can be assembled. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.