Word On Books
with Jeremy Fenton
Dinosaurs of Darkness
By Rich and Vickers-Rich
Published by Allen and Unwin
 In the early days of the arrival of European folk in Australia the phrase 'The Ghastly Blank' was coined to describe the vast 'unknown and unexplored' regions of the continent (usually appearing as white space on maps).
In the early 1980s Tom and Pat Rich expanded this term from a 'geographic to a paleontologic sense'.
While a reasonable amount of information exists on the relatively recent ancestral history of Australia's mammals and birds (that is the period covering the past 20 million years or so), the period beyond this has largely remained a mystery due to lack of evidence and (it must be said) lack of commitment to serious scientific endeavour in the country.
Overall the discovery of rich dinosaur bone deposits has been sporadic and unsymmetrical in Australia - with states like Victoria yielding scant evidence until the past couple of decades.
The Rich's Ghastly Blank project sought to fill this gaping hole in our knowledge through a comprehensive and ongoing effort at uncovering what lies 'buried' at the romantically named Dinosaur Cove (on the South-Eastern Victorian coastline), alongside exhaustive comparative research that stretched from Alaska to Argentina.
What makes this research so compelling (and scientifically tentative) is that Australia between 100 and 120 million years ago was situated far south of where it is today (it's moving north at about the rate your fingernail grows at) as part of the super-continent Gondwanaland. This places it squarely in today's Antarctic latitudes - a place of obvious extreme cold and inevitable long winters of darkness.
What emerges from Dinosaurs of Darkness is a previously unknown picture of the 'terrible lizards' that frolicked under the aurora australis in conditions that were not-that-long-ago thought to be prohibitive to their forms of life.
Could these dinosaurs have been warm blooded?
Did some of them actually hibernate during winter?
Dinosaurs of Darkness puts forward a very strong case that answers both questions in the positive, in the progression giving insight into the rigors and by-ways of science and the personalities who push its frontiers continually forward.
It's a cliché these days to say that books on archaeological discoveries and hypotheses are detective stories, but if the bone fits...
At the very least the authors have shed light on a previously uncovered area of scientific inquiry (in the popular press anyway), at best they have put forward some spectacular and credible possibilities regarding the ancient creatures of our part of the world.
That the book is as much about the actual discovery process as the discoveries themselves only makes it more interesting. There's nothing more disingenuous than a book that, even by omission, claims that science exists in a vacuum (whether it be moral or omission of collaborators).
It doesn't, and the Richs make it abundantly clear that this is the case.
Recommended popular science from Australia.
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