A mouse weighs about one ounce, has a heart rate of 700 beats per minute, a gestation period of 21 days, and lives for less than 3 years. A 5-ton elephant has a heart rate of 30 beats per minute, a 22 month gestation period, a slow metabolic rate and lives for 60 years or more. How are these facts related? In this text Christopher McGowan investigates a wide range of size-related phenomena, from the gliding mechnism of diatoms to blood pressure problems of dinosaurs. A journey through the natural world and life in its various forms.
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With a background in paleobiology, Christopher McGowan is adept at asking deceptively simple but actually very awkward questions of the "Well, we've dug up this fossil skeleton, now how on God's earth did it ever fly?" variety.
McGowan looks at the way the scale and shape of animals relates to their behaviour, diet and life span. Why, in other words, tortoises live far longer than guinea-pigs, but aren't nearly as much fun.
This line of argument leads to some seriously counter-intuitive physics as McGowan explains how animals of different scales handle and exploit the physical constants by which they are bound. Discussions of drag, inertia and viscosity are particularly well-handled.
Especially refreshing and entertaining is McGowan's happy willingness to admit that millions of years of evolution are smarter than he is. Sometimes, animals just make no sense at all. Consider Quetzalcoatlus, a pterosaur with a 40-foot wingspan and a long, serpentine neck. How did it get off the ground? Its neck suggests it may have been a carrion feeder. Did it climb laboriously to the peak of some vast saurian carcass and hitch a passing thermal? "This entire scenario," McGowan admits, with delicious understatement, "strikes me as fanciful".
While Diatoms to Dinosaurs is marketed very much at adults, there is an infectious enthusiasm about McGowan's writing that suggests a gifted teacher sharing sophisticated just-so stories with a spellbound class. --Simon Ings
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By David
The author, Chris McGowan, does a good job of covering a subject that is advoided by less gifted scientists. He is a rare biologist in that he shows a strong understanding of physics that he applies in the context of evolutionary theory. The result is that he is able to produce the correct answers to many biology questions where other writers continue to wander in the dark.
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