Generally speaking, I find the "Life of the Past" series of the Indiana University Press to be a good balance of scientific theory and "sense of wonder" about the creatures themselves. This time out though, the basic problem is too much theory and not enough turtles. It would also be fine for the author to present a scientific memoir that dealt with how the foundations of what constituted scientific authority changed in the course of his career, but about half way through this book Rieppel gets lost in the weeds, going on at too much length about individuals who, I have to admit, really don't interest me. Perhaps Rieppel, at a certain point, needed to emphasize a bit more how the statistical processes of Cladistics were a response to too much dependence on the authority of eminent men who, perhaps, were not really deserving of that authority.

Rieppel eventually does get back to turtles, and the long-running controversies about their history, fueled by a simple lack of good fossils. That might have been another point the author could have played up: It doesn't matter how good your analysis is if you simply lack data to process. The question being whether turtles are a very old form of reptile, or whether their emergence occurs much later, at about the same time as the dinosaurs. It wasn't until the great Chinese fossil boom that the long missing "intermediate" forms were discovered (one species of which graces the cover art), and which backed up the statistical and genetic analysis which suggested that turtles are a relatively recent arrival on the scene.

With all that said I really can't recommend this work, which probably needed more hard-headed editing. ( )

This is an article about turtle evolution, excessively padded with biographical and historical material to turn it into a short book. The information about turtles was technical and interesting, but the reader has to sift through vast quanitites of (mostly irrelevant) text on various researchers (including the author) - their biographies, places of residence and work, politics, field trips, historical context and the like. Turtles only make an appearance halfway through the book. This made the whole book rather tedious despite the interesting examination of turtle evolutionary developmental history. The book also covers the development of evolutionary theory and cladistics. Some sketches and graphics were included, but nothing particularly exciting or useful.

OTHER RECOMMENDED BOOK

Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur by Carl Safina


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