Just a brief announcement: my next book - Dinopedia: A Brief Compendium of Dinosaur Lore - will be published by Princeton University Press later this year, and here’s a tiny bit of information about it…
Dinopedia is part of PUP’s highly successful and critically acclaimed Pedia Books series, several volumes of which already exist (Fungipedia, Birdpedia and so on). These are compact, engaging, written in A-Z style for a popular audience, and highly affordable too.
Dinopedia is essentially a guide to our modern understanding of Mesozoic dinosaurs, combining thoughts on dinosaur diversity and evolution, the people who study, illustrate or promote Mesozoic dinosaurs, and various relevant cultural and scientific events. It isn’t the heavy-going review of changing thoughts on dinosaur phylogeny I was, at one stage, planning it to be… that might have to wait to another time. And don’t be a smartass by claiming that the term ‘lore’ is inappropriate when talking about our knowledge of long-extinct animals. It isn’t, since ‘lore’ refers to a general body of known things passed around in conversation, it doesn’t specifically refer to poems of the Ancient Britons or the exploits of Paul Bunyan.
I’ll finish here by saying that I produced all the art myself (including the Styracosaurus on the cover). I’m really keen to show it to you, but that would ruin the surprise (above is a sneak-peek). I will say that I spent so much time drawing scales over Christmas and New Year that I developed an unpleasant illness - a hilarious tale which I might recount on the podcast some time. A few of the illustrations have been shared at my patreon site.
For more information on Dinopedia, go here on the Princeton University Press website.
