Walking on Eggs by Luis Chiappe and Lowell Dingus, Little, Brown,
£16.99, ISBN 0316854891
IGNORE the subtitle. This book isn’t about dinosaurs in general but about the
authors’ expeditions to Auca Mahuevo in Argentinian Patagonia, a site with
seriously interesting palaeontology. It has yielded thousands of dinosaur eggs
trapped by floods 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous. For the first time
it is clear that these are the eggs of sauropods—the “Brontosaurus”-type
beasties we all know and love. And there are baby dinosaurs in the eggs, also
nests, trails of footprints and bones of the adults, not to mention the
skeletons of the dreadful carnivores that preyed on them.
Field palaeontologists, we see, are expert in fund raising, administration
and camp management. Tribulations include flash floods, lightning strikes, the
dottier media, looters and the frustration of too many discoveries and not
enough time or kit.
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The drawings of the beasties in life are cute, though it seems a bit mean to
tell us that National Geographic has photographed the colourful scenery and then
give us monochrome photos. I could have done without some of the digressions
into palaeontology in general. I enjoyed Walking on Eggs and was sorry to
finish.
