Ellis, R. 2003. Sea dragons. Predators of the prehistoric oceans. – Lawrence, University Press of Kansas

Abstract

I always read with much pleasure the works of Richard Ellis. A great writer and greatly experienced in the things of the sea, many of his books have left a deep sign in the divulgative literature of the last years. Still, for a palaeontologist the last two books of Ellis are the best. He started with Aquagenesis, describing the history of life in the sea (even though too much vertebrate-oriented, to be honest), and he now keeps the pace with this excellent ‘Sea dragons’. As Ellis himself notes in the introduction, there are very few books about marine reptiles of the Mesozoic, and this is the first discussing this subject in the last 50 years (if not more); the excellent ‘Ancient Marine Reptiles’ by Callaway & Nicholls is a collection of papers and not a monograph.

The book opens up with a walk in the American Museum of Natural History, New York and follows with several chapters dedicated to each of the great marine reptile groups that lived during the Mesozoic. It gives a brief glance to what happened in the Palaeozoic, and provides a lot of background and literature, as usual in work by Ellis, concerning each and every subject. Read more...