Gaining Ground (Jennifer A. Clack, 2002)

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ISBN 0-2533-4054-3

However, I feel GG falls between audiences. The book probably amounts to little more than a review for the specialist, yet it is vastly over-whelming for the layman and too poorly organised to provide much value to serious students. A comment like that requires an explanation or, rather, two. First, the poor old layman (and, in the field of vertebrate paleontology, I am as good an example as any) is presented with the obligatory 20 pages or so explaining what is a fossil, what is the geological timescale, what is phylogeny, and so on, gratuitously pausing to mention that "birds are dinosaurs" (definitely a red rag to this bull - read why). This is all rather mundane stuff, which any layman interested in paleontology will have read dozens of times. The next nine pages, however, are a very different story. Here is a sample:

'The appendicular skeleton comprises the limbs and girdles, at the front the shoulder or pectoral set, and at the back, the hip or pelvic set. Figure 2.5 shows views of the shoulder and Figure 2.6 the hip girdles of Eusthenopteron and a tetrapod. The pectoral girdle is a mixture of elements, consisting of dermal bones such as the cleithrum, clavicle, and interclavicle and the endochondral scapulocoracoid. It is this latter bone that provides the articulatory socket, or glenoid, for the pectoral appendages, and it fits within and behind the sheathing series of dermal bones.' — p. 29

Wow, what a transition! But this is not simply a case of picking up the pace: actually understanding much of the subsequent text requires one to have learned (or at least remembered the names of) these bones from this whirlwind tour. I venture to suggest this material is simply too densely-written for a lay audience; I expect many a second-year vertebrate zoology student would struggle with it.

Which brings us to my second point, really a generalisation of the first. The organisation of the book is not really conducive to learning. For one example, it is set out geochronologically rather than by smaller-scale evolutionary themes (more interesting for the layman, perhaps, but unhelpful to the struggling student). Another example, which particularly nagged me, is the inconsistent use of various taxonomic ranks. One minute we're talking about lysorophids, the next microsaurs, then lepospondyls. It was only once I took out a notebook and began sytematically tracking all these names down in the text that I discovered that a lysorophid is a kind of microsaur, which in turn is a kind of lepospondyl, except it might not be. It shouldn't require detective work to learn the sense of a textbook. Incidentally, I was prompted to undertake this exercise in order to compare the cladograms which fill the book from page 271 onwards, and are the worst example of this problem. Without your own "systematic index" these will be a complete mystery to even an advanced student, who, gazing at fig. 10.3 for example, is otherwise unlikely to realise that Paleothyris is included as a proxy for the Diapsida.

One aspect that particularly impressed me and which, to be fair, may have been impossible to achieve with a different structure, was the breadth adopted at the beginning of several chapters, to place the "action" in a meaningful ecological context. These small vignettes paint a reasonable picture of the life and times of Acanthostega et al., and alone are worth the price of the book.

Recommendation: Recommended, though with the provision mentioned above.

Look and Feel: A good-quality hardback. Photographs are matt b&w, and the reproduction somewhat variable. The many line drawings are mostly very good.

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Gaining Ground (Jennifer A. Clack, 2002)

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