Reviewed by Ephraim Nissan (London, England)
Donovan, S.K. 2021. Hands-On Paleontology: A Practical Manual. Dunedin Academic Press, Edinburgh, Scotland. 240 pp. (£24.99 for paperback.)
Sandwiched between the brief introduction and a glossary followed by a detailed index, this book for the beginner (amateur or undergraduate) has 53 numbered chapters (each with its own bibliography), clustered in five parts: “Getting started” (chapters 1–17: “How to collect”, “Where to collect”, “The field notebook”, and so forth, up to “Collecting with a camera,” and “Buying specimens”), “Some theoretical aspects” (chapters 18–25, on organisms, palaeoecology, preservation in nature, and trace fossils), “Working on your collection at home”, comprising chapters 26–33, from “Storage” and “Labelling” to “Casting from natural moulds” and “Problems with preservation”, which come in “three common ‘nasty’ scenarios […]: sea salt crystallization; drying mudrocks; and pyrite disease” (139), or more precisely: “pyrite decay or pyrite rot (all the same thing)” (140). One of the papers cited about this disease is Nigel Larkin’s helpful article of 2019, bearing the explicitly prescriptive title “Keep calm and call the conservator: it is only pyrite decay and your specimen may be salvageable” (Geological Curator 11: 33–38).
The next cluster is “The wider field: getting involved”, which includes chapters 34–43, namely, “Collaboration”, “Scientific societies”, “Conferences”, “Journals and magazines”, “Offprints, PDFs and filing”, “Visiting museums”, “Ideas for further involvement” (comprising the sections “Talking about fossils”, i.e., giving talks to the general public; “Exhibitions”, e.g., at the annual Festival of Geology in Britain (held annually on the first Saturday of November, with additional geology walks scheduled the next day); and “Conference,” which, the author reassures us, is not a repetition of a previous chapter, but rather suggests: “why not run a conference yourself” on a local level?). And then three chapters about how to publish.
The last part (chapters 44–53) begins with “The field guide”, whereas the rest are chapters about particular field trips: one to the Netherlands, one to Antigua, and all of the others in England (non in Scotland, where the book was published), including a field trip to Piltdown (a place notorious in paleoanthropology, because of the Piltdown man forgery).
Many of the images in the book are in color. This is a gentle manual, not heavy on technical details, but practical, and serious about its subjects, which it enucleates into discrete units corresponding to distinct chapters. It is an introductory textbook, never looking down on you, and never self-importantly “initiatic.”
It tells you also things you would otherwise probably not find in writing, out of the expectation that you are going to hear it from your lecturers. This book does not make that assumption. The charm of this book is that it is never self-important, and yet, by being true to its subtitle, A Practical Manual, it is important for beginners, all the more so if you live in England (which the present reviewer does indeed). Were you to not even have an idea about how to get started and then how to get about it, this is an unassuming book into which to look. Actually, the author suggests that there are two manners of reading it: cover to cover, or reading a particular chapter that is relevant when you need it. It is a sensible book.