Paleontology and Dinosaurs

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Anybody else love this?
I missed out on this special interest as a child (although I was passionately devoted to archaeology) but got deeply interested in it as an adult when my child got into it. I mourned when he moved on (although his herpetology special interest has been a delight too).
What books/audiobooks/articles/shows/movies do you love? What are your favorite species?
What are your thoughts on the weird way that we have culturally symbolized an entire clade of animal life? It's wild to me that, for example, eagles are predatory dinosaurs, and yet the way we symbolize them is hugely different than extinct theropods.

Back in the 80s I saw David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" TV series, and got turned on to the evolution thing, and how groups of animals had their (often seemingly unlikely) origins.

Began to devour books about fossils for a long time. And that was right when the radical new think about dinosaurs came in ...that some of them may have been warm blooded, and that they were more birdlike than lizard like, and so on. So I would read books about the debates about it.

Its become the new orthodoxy now that "birds are dinosaurs", but there are still some scientists who hold out on the old idea.

Dinosaurs were a huge special interest as a child and even now they're a latent one.

Recently I've been really interested in the basal pterosaurs and hoping their evolution from their last common ancestor with dinosaurs will become better understood.

Had to take a Paleontology class as part of a GEOL cluster in college. Non-dinosaur fossils were the most interesting, like Trilobites, Ammonites and prehistoric relatives of octopi.

Belemnites I think. I learned all sorts of things in that class, like Michigan is all Limestone and Flint because it was part of a shallow marine environment at some point, this is also true of Dover U.K.

I have a prized hardback copy of "Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould, about the strange Cambrian invertbrates of the Burgess Shale site. Superb hand-drawn illustrations, too.

Did someone say eagle? lol My favorite dinos are birbs, hands down.

Wish I had a more up-to-date book on taxonomy. I find it fascinating how different groups of animal are related. The closest living group to birds is crocodilians, of all things. They diverged way back in the Permian, but they both belong to the archosaur clade along with the pterosaurs and the (non birdy) dinosaurs.

I've just been watching a video about a group of small dinosaurs that developed flight independantly of the lineage that led to birds. They had bat-like wings that used a long wrist spur for support.