Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earths History by Peter D. Ward

Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earths History Reviews

• 
  Mir

  If you're wondering how anyone could write an entire non-specialist text on a long-extinct suborder of theriodonts, the answer is not to be found here. Gorgonopsids feature minimally in this book, and the promised insert is mostly photos of people looking at rocks, not pictures of dinosaurs.
  
  False advertising aside, this is a fine book about an individual's series of archaeological undertakings. Ward's research focus is not therapsids themselves, but the large question of how exactly the first mass extinction on earth, the *Permian/Triassic boundary, occurred and how long the process took.
  
  (About 250 million years ago, life on Earth nearly came to an end. The end of the Permian period saw the loss of 96% of marine life, 70% of terrestrial vertebrates, possibly masses of vegetation, and is thought to be the only mass extinction of insects.)
  
  Ward's experience is also firmly placed in a specific time and place, the Apartheid era. This was significant not just from a political and human justice perspective, but also in how it affected people's ability to travel and the availability of skilled labor, funding for jobs, etc.
• 
  Jamie Smith

  If you pick up this book by Peter Ward thinking it will be about the Gorgons, the lion-sized apex predators of the last years of the Permian age, you will be disappointed. The beasts themselves play only a minor role in the story, and if you took everything the book says about them it would probably fill only a page or two. Instead, this book is about the search for the cause of their extinction, the great dying-off of 250 million years ago, when over 90% of land and sea creatures went extinct, the closest life ever came to being wiped out.
  
  For decades it was believed that the extinction event was caused by gradual changes in the climate, along with volcanic activity, and extending for millions of years. After the discovery of the impact event that ended the age of dinosaurs 66 million years ago, there was new interest in finding out whether a similar catastrophe could have ended the Permian.
  
  This book describes Ward’s excavations in the Karoo, a harsh, arid region of South Africa, subject to extremes of heat and cold. Its rocks straddle the Permian-Cretaceous boundary, and are rich in fossils from both sides of the boundary. He visited it half a dozen times in the 80s and 90s, collecting fossils and studying the layers of rock. He describes the processes by which paleontologists gather evidence to build theories, and anyone who thinks that it is glamorous work will be disabused of that notion. It was endless drudgery under terrible conditions in a very hostile climate. At one point he visits with an expert in geomagnetism, tracking the age of rocks based on their magnetic alignment when they solidified. They drilled two hundred fifty cores in the rock, averaging about twenty a day, and it was dirty, tedious, exhausting work in brutal heat.
  
  For someone who had been to the Karoo and knew its dangers, the author had an odd habit of going out unprepared. At one point he is there in the winter and gets caught in a furious snowstorm, but had forgotten to bring a jacket and had only two sweaters. Another time, in the hottest days of the summer, he left half his water behind because it was heavy, and suffered greatly in the scorching heat.
  
  The book sometimes drifts away from its main subject, as if the author wanted to show that he is not just a scientist, but a responsible social critic as well. He made his first visits to South Africa when it was still under apartheid, and notes that for whites it was safe and orderly but oppressive. He returns after black majority rule was established, and saw the country slipping into increasing lawlessness and chaos. His comments are interesting, but South Africa’s struggles in the post-apartheid era are well known, and the book adds little to the reader’s understanding of them. Only one non-white companion on his trips to the Karoo is described in any detail.
  
  There is still no generally accepted explanation for the great extinction, and arguments are made for both catastrophism and gradualism. Both sides have evidence to support their position, but none of it is conclusive. No one has found an impact crater, and the the affiliated geological evidence is subject to multiple interpretations.
  
  The author’s position, when this book was published in 2004, was that sea levels fell, exposing vast beds of organic material which began to oxidize, pulling so much oxygen out of the atmosphere that it affected the ability of animals to breathe. At the same time, enormous, long lasting volcanic eruptions pushed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing further respiratory distress. Ultimately, he believes, the animals slowly suffocated. It might have taken thousands or tens of thousands of years but in geological time that would still be considered a rapidly unfolding event. What survived seemed to be creatures with large lung capacity, such as cynodonts, the ancestors of mammals. He speculates that they could have originally evolved at high altitude, developing large lungs to compensate for the thin air, which enabled their descendants to survive until the atmosphere turned favorable for life again. For millions of years after the Permian-Cretaceous boundary event cynodonts are one of the few fossils found in abundance.
  
  This book is more about the paleontology grind than the animals of the time or their lives. For those with an interest in the processes involved in painstakingly gathering evidence and then turning it into theories, papers, grants (and jobs), there are interesting details here. For those who were looking for a window into another age of the earth, there are more focused books to choose from.
• 
  Jared Pechacek

  You can't subtitle your book "The Monsters That Ruled The Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died In The Greatest Catastrophe In Earth's History" and then give readers a hundred pages of you wandering around looking at rocks. Actually, you can't subtitle your book that at all, because that is unwieldy as h*ck. And you certainly can't do it, then ignore the monsters.
  
  Really, that subtitle is the book in a microcosm: Most of it doesn't need to be there, it promises more than it delivers, and it's awkwardly structured. For a book about the Permian-Triassic extinction, relatively little space is devoted to one of the worst ecological disasters in Earth's history. No, what actually matters is that Peter D. Ward went to South Africa, wasn't racist there, and looked at a bunch of rocks. And he will tell you about it all in prose purpler than a gymnast's bruise.
  
  Gorgon follows Ward's search for the cause of the Permian extinction, buried in the rocks of the Karoo region of South Africa. The thing is, the cover copy leads you to believe it's about the gorgonopsids, a family of bizarre animals which met their end during that extinction event. That subtitle promises it. The cover has one of their skeletons. The book is even freaking named "gorgon". So I, for one, spent most of the book waiting for some glimpse into their biology, environment, possible behavior, and was rewarded only by page after page about strata in the Karoo. See, Gorgon is really about the extinction, but pretends otherwise for far too long.
  
  Also known as the Great Dying, the extinction itself is a fascinating topic. About 250 million years ago, life on Earth nearly came to an end. The end of the Permian period saw the loss of 96% of marine life, 70% of terrestrial vertebrates, and is (according to Wikipedia) the only mass extinction of insects. Nobody is quite sure why, though Ward mentions a number of theories and comes to his own conclusions involving, essentially, the planet rusting to death. When Gorgon focuses on this huge mystery, it's gripping, like a detective story where the victim is an entire world. But Ward can't keep his mind on this when there are more interesting things to talk about, like Peter D. Ward.
  
  He really does not come off well, let's say. I find it's generally safe to say that the purpler the prose, the larger the ego: you really need massive self-confidence if you're gonna plunge your readers into a maze of adjectives. Which can be fine. But Ward isn't as good a writer as he thinks he is; he can't just say "the pizza had old vegetables"; he has to say, multiple times, that the vegetables were as ancient as [a different geological thing each time]. Like, dude, there's poetic writing full of memorable images, and then there's trying too hard.
  
  He also spends far too long blathering about 1) South African politics, 2) the environment of the Karoo, 3) his marriage, and 4) how hot one of his colleagues is. It's clear Gorgon is partly just a chance for him to talk. I think all this is intended to give human touches to a book that has the potential to be quite dry, but it reads like: 1) I'm not racist, guys, like at all; 2) I read a travel book once; 3) honey I have to be gone all the time for Science Reasons; and 4) I'm a huge creep. (Seriously. He talks more about how beautiful his colleague is than he does about his own wife, in any capacity.) And when he's not bloviating about all that, he goes on and on about rocks when doing so adds nothing and, in fact, actively detracts from whatever he's trying to accomplish. I get that examining rocks is how we know anything about the ancient world, but every chance he gets he swoons over the colors and at one point ejaculates a stream of synonyms when he could just say "red".
  
  The Permian extinction parts are great. But. The prose, the ego, the rocks, the leering: It's just—it's a lot to go through merely to get to his ~groundbreaking theory~, which takes up just a few pages right before the end. And he never even gets to the freaking gorgons.
• 
  Colleen

  Remember Roy Chapman Andrews and his stories about fossil hunting in the Gobi Desert in the 1930s? Well, this is the tale of fossil hunting in the 1990s in South Africa's unforgivingly harsh Karoo badlands. It's also the tale of geologists figuring how when exactly the first mass extinction on earth, the Permian/Triassic boundary occured (250 million years ago), and why. Marine sediment told a story of mass ocean dieoffs, but there wasn't any good evidence for land animals. This is the back story, how geologists drilled into sedimentary deposits covering themselves with mud under the blazing sun, to get a magnetic record of time. The timeline of the planet. Armed with a timeline and fossils found in that timeline they could see if there was some planet-wide catastrophe like the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The driving vision is much darker than Andrews'. And much more urgent. The amount of CO2 we have put into the atmosphere is close to what we know the planet had at 250 million years ago. What survived? Birds. Able to fly to a lake in the Himalayas, 30,000 feet up. Disturbing to think about.
  
  
• 
  Nicky

  
  Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
  
  If you’re looking for information on the gorgonopsids and their world, this book is rather thin on that. Instead, it’s mostly about Ward’s career and some of his excavations and initiatives. Admittedly, much of that is in the service of getting information about the gorgonopsids, but the book is rather thin on what was actually found. There is some interesting stuff on pinning down that mass extinction and figuring out how fast it happened, but the gorgonopsids in life — how they lived, what they did — are absent.
  
  So pretty interesting in terms of understanding Ward’s career as a palaeontologist, with the appropriate set pieces about how hot it was and how difficult, etc, etc, but low on actual pre-dinosaurian monsters ruling the Earth.
  
  
  Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
• 
  Henry

  A very good book if you want a book about paleo. In the Karoo desert with its intense heat and even snowsqualls, with biting insects, researchers dig up a veritable monster that lived long before the dinosaurs and probably would have made mincemeat of them. It is like a detective story but in real life.
• 
  Annie

  Unlike Douglas Erwin's
  Extinction, which I read two months ago (and which also focuses on the end-Permian mass extinction event), this reads more like a memoir than a pop science book, in some ways. The primary focus of the book is the author's personal and professional journey in regards to his quest to solve the question of the extinction.
  
  The end-Permian extinction is probably the most debated extinction. Just a few decades ago, scientists assumed all mass extinction events were gradual, happening over millions of years. But after the question of the end-Cretaceous extinction (dinosaurs' extinction) was solved by the father and son Alvarez team in the late 1980s, and it was revealed to be an asteroid impact that probably caused the extinction in a matter of just a few years. With that information in hand, some scientists began wondering whether other mass extinction events were also shorter in duration. The most hotly debated extinction is the end-Permean event, which killed off the mammal-like reptiles, including the titular Gorgons (huge saber-toothed carnivores).
  
  Ward, just as Erwin, devoted his career to solving this question. This book chronicles his search for evidence in the Karoo Desert of South Africa, causing his personal (family) life to suffer. I think Ward was trying to make this book, in part, of the nature of obsession, but it's something he just sort of repeats ("Why did I keep abandoning my toddler and my wife to fly halfway around the world to endure shitty living conditions and do hard labor chipping at rocks in a desert?") without really digging into it further, so that was unsatisfying.
  
  Other than the first few chapters, where Ward gives us the lay of the land of the extinction, not a whole lot of the book is related to the actual science. The exception is the final few chapters, where the author reveals his own hypothesis as to the cause: dropping ocean levels exposed sediment that oxidized in the air (i.e. it rusted--as evidenced by the vividly red rock found in that strata all over the globe), in doing so using up oxygen molecules in the air across the world. Oxygen levels dropped, carbon dioxide went up, and plants and animals struggled from the lack of oxygen. He posits that the reason dinosaurs' ancestors survived this extinction is because, like their offspring, the modern bird, dinosaurs had air sacs as well as lungs that allowed them to survive in low oxgyen (birds, for instance, can fly over Mt. Everest with seemingly no problem with the lack of oxygen).
  
  However, that entire theory is laid out in like, 3 pages of the book. It was rushed and didn't explain itself very well. I'd have given this a higher rating if the majority of the book had been dedicated to that, rather than constantly re-iterating how unpleasant it is to stay in crappy motels or roasting tents while on a dig.
• 
  Sally

  Meh.
  
  I concur with other reviewers re: the false advertising (This is not a book about the Permian, this is a book about the author's adventures while researching the Permian) and re: the less than adept handling of South African politics and race.
  
  Also I could have done with less of all women being repeatedly described based entirely on their physical attractiveness (except wives, who exist only to weep and try to talk people out of doing science.)
  
  Also he doesn't even do a great job with explaining the science; the accounts of what fieldwork and labwork entail are pretty good, but the last few chapters, which are theoretically actually about their conclusions re: the Permian extinction itself, are pretty incoherent.
• 
  Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle

  Some people may feel like this book misrepresents itself as a science text, when in fact it's more of a travelogue, in the spirit of Charles Darwin or Freya Stark. I read reviews and a summary (always wise) beforehand and was thus prepared for this not to be a scientific analysis, but more of a personal account. I have also read a number of Mr. Ward's other books and was well acquainted with his literary quirks of throwing about personal experiences and events in his life as they happen in the timeline of the discovery process; I.e: In The Life and Death of Planet Earth, he uses the slow, heartbreaking death of his mother as a narrative tool to widen the emotional scope of the transient life of the planet, and all life on it.
  I, personally, find it to be refreshing- as he comes across as both genuine and imperfect. He doesn't shine himself in the best light- he seems to know his flaws, but he is honest, about himself and others. He is insightful and observant, but occasionally also stunningly oblivious or socially inept (science folk often are, myself included)- to both personal and scientific facts.
  The book is largely devoted to his time spent in the Karoo desert in South Africa. The social upheavals of the times he visited, his interactions with others while there, what the sky looked like, what kind of car they rented, what they ate for dinner, how loud they argued, how uncomfortable the beds were, what being mugged was like, looking for bones while jet lagged, the infuriating process of drilling cores, the smell of the night air, the heady intoxication of success, the bitter sting of failure, and what they found and how- both the exciting and the mundane in equal measure, interlaced with Ward's particular literary flourishes and love for long, adjective heavy descriptions of time and place.
  Ultimately, he draws the book in to a reasonably good conclusion, and though I do wish there were *more* to the whole book (it clocks in under 250 pages) it was a lovely way to break up the largely science and fact-heavy nonfiction books I've been reading lately, and to throw in some adventure, tick bites, sunburns, and mashed up sandwiches.
  
  Thumbs up, fun read!
  
  On a side note:
  Some people have remarked that they found this book to be either sexist or culturally insensitive, but frankly that's just horseshit. He reflects on the beauty of a female coworker briefly- he also reflects on her strength of character, and the beauty of the African stars so it's condemned out of context, though I would hazard a guess that working in the field, there's quite a bit of uh... unexpected fraternization? He also describes the mid and post-apartheid governmental upheaval in the most condemnatory of ways. His observations and opinions are his own, and he makes no claim of being an engine for social change. Though he clearly is progressive minded, ultimately his interests lie in science, and his opinions and actions aren't as nuanced as the clearly perfect saints who've offered their critiques. I'm of the opinion that the people who found this 'offensive' were looking for something to be offended by, frankly, but that's just imho, and I'm a total a*hole, so whatever.
• 
  Matt Kuhns

  Very, very good. The title of this book is, honestly, somewhat misleading. Its focus is not really the gorgon or even the entire category of "mammal-like reptiles" or how they went extinct. That's in the book, and interesting, but the book is more a travel writing / memoir about the author's experiences finding and studying these fossils, mostly in South Africa.
  
  The interest and quality of the writing makes the misleadingly titled Gorgon well worthwhile, as does the author's inclusion of the contemporary events in South Africa. When he began his work there it was an apartheid state, dramatically but painfully changing over the course of his visits. There's no ivory-tower omission of this as "someone else's department," here.
• 
  Kathleen McRae

  This book is about the author's lifetime obsession with the search for the extinction event that occurred in the Karoo Desert in South Africa 260 million yrs ago The T rex of that time was The Gorgon and it was one evolutionary step away from mammals until a extinction event delays things . This book is interesting but primarily about the archeology digs the author has participated inand the writing is easy to read.
• 
  Valaya Gaudet

  The title is misleading. There is very little information about the gorgonopsians. On the other hand, the search for the causes of the P/T extinction in the South African Karoo, the hunt for fossils, the glimpse into the politics of South Africa are truly interesting. I only wish the author would not have filled the book with so much of his emotional highs and lows. They were a distraction from the subject and frankly, a real downer that I could have done without.
• 
  🐓🌔

  i expected a book about the Permian era and Theriodonts and got a book which is peppered by the former but mostly about the process of finding and extracting fossils, the Karoo desert, apartheid from a white outsider’s perspective, and Ward’s colleagues.
  
  It was a smooth read though and gives good insight on the Permian extinction and the philosophy of good science.
• 
  Larry Rolfes

  I read this book because I thought it was about science and the Permian extinction. It is about that, but it’s also a sort of travel adventure, as we follow the author through the trials and travails of life as a paleontologist in the field. Overall, an interesting read.
• 
  Gianandrea Ghirri

  The life the death and everything inward
• 
  Kirsten

  I was a bit disappointed with this book, since it was not so much about "the monsters that ruled the planet before the dinosaurs" as it was about Ward's experiences working in the Karoo Desert in South Africa. It was interesting to learn about what it's actually like to be a paleontologist, and he writes of his adventures in the wilderness with a great deal of wit. But there was comparatively little information about the actual creatures, and not nearly as much information as I was expecting about the catastrophe that wiped them out. I was left feeling as though I would love to sit down and talk with the author over a cup of coffee -- and then ask him why he hadn't written the book that I expected this to be!
  
• 
  Bevan

  This book is about the Permian/Triassic Extinction Event, Gorgonopsians, paleontology, and obsessive research. Dr. Ward has explored the famous Karoo Desert in South Africa, where so many of these proto-mammals were discovered, and he describes the nitty-gritty of fossil collecting.
  
  In particular, much of the story here is about the P/T boundary and why it is important. How did 96 percent of all life on Earth suddenly disappear, and what caused that catastrophe? These are not easy questions to answer, and there have been many false leads and dead ends.
  
  The passion of Dr. Ward shows through every page of this book, and it is a pleasure to read. Lastly, there are hints of what might be important for our future here on Earth.
  
  
• 
  Bill

  This book is not about the Permian extinction as I thought it would be. It is about the hunt for bones and the field work behind the science that allowed scientists to piece together the time frame of that event. It reads like a novel and tells of the drama, excitement, boredom, and human interaction both good and bad in this quest for knowledge. If I can find a fault with the book it is the author presents himself as a bit of a douche out in the field at times. My guess is everyone had the same faults but is was easier to project them all on himself rather that make enemies in paleontology and face possible future lawsuits.
• 
  Tycoon

  Peter Ward tries to get a little too poetic at times, and for me, it just comes off as maudlin. I enjoyed the portions about fieldwork and about apartheid (one of those important historical events I was aware of, but never grasped). I particularly did not like the pseudo-colonial attitude he expressed whenever he wrote "Ahhhhh, AFRICA!", as if that single word was supposed to convey all the richness and variety contained within a continent. Still, a nice follow-up to something like GG Simpson's Attending Marvels.
• 
  Alice Lemon

  I definitely enjoyed reading this book---I'm a big fan of the "paleontology narrative" style of writing, at least when it's done by the actual paleontologists. I think I learned a decent amount of science from it, too, and hope to read more by Ward (this is the first of his books I've read). However, I do find the title and his vague symbolic focus on gorgonopsians a bit odd, as they don't have that strong a connection to the actual topic, his work on understanding the causes of the end-Permian mass extinction.