Sea Dragons: Predators of the Prehistoric Oceans Book

Sea Dragons is not for everyone. I wanted to know more about these marine reptiles and the book helped me accomplish that goal. However at times, it was tough sledding! I had to persevere through many dry, dull, and confusing paragraphs to get there.
It seems to me that the author wrote the book as follows: he did an extensive literature search, took notes on 5 X 7 cards, sorted the cards by topic (kind of) and wrote the book from the card information. The result is a ton of detailed information but not without its problems. There are contradictions throughout the book. There are vast differences of opinion between the experts cited. They remain unresolved. The author seldom, if ever, weighs in to settle the disputes. Also, the technical jargon can be a huge obstacle to comprehension (at least for the layman readers). The author is keenly aware of this and tries to massage the problem. However he doesn't consistently do it nor does he always do it at the introduction of new terminology.(e.g., He never defined "pinniped" until after numerous pages of using the term).

It is hard to come away from this book with many generalizations about marine reptiles that seem firmly grounded. There is far too much equivication. For example, just how the marine reptiles used their four flippers to propel themselves is still a big mystery to me. The paleontologists can not seem to agree on this according to Ellis. Surely, some ranking of importance of the different theories could be made.

One observation I made and the author seems to have missed is the important difference in the tails of these creatures. The ichthyosaurs have a fishlike tail, the pleiosaurs and pliosaurs have a reptile-like tail (round in cross-section and tapered), and the mosasaurs have an oar-like tail. Knowing this, I can tell from the pictures, what the animal is.

The ichthyosaurs seemed to me to be the best adapted because they were most fishlike. Yet they went extinct first. The author says that new fish had evolved which ate the ichthyosaur young. Wouldn't those also be able to eat the plesiosaur, pliosaur and mosasaur young?

To the author I say, " You have done a lot of good goundwork but this book isn't finished. You need to thoroughly revise this book and deal with the contradictions, try to form some conclusions and generalizations from all the data, and do more to solve the jargon problem. The illustrations were vital. You need even more of them. Why? because the binomial names are meaningless babble without the picture of the animal. Also, provide some graphics to show order, family, genus and species of these animals. I can't see the forest for the trees.

Ralph Hermansen May 3, 2008