Ancient Marine Reptiles

Edited by:
  • Jack M. Callaway &
  • Elizabeth L. Nicholls
Academic: 1997. Pp. 501 $64.95, £49.95<

This book hails itself as the long overdue revision of Samuel Williston's Water Reptiles of the Past and Present (1914). The claim invites comparison. Williston wrote his book by himself; 28 authors, contributing 17 chapters and 6 introductions, have produced Ancient Marine Reptiles. Williston's book was devoted to a taxonomic and biological review of marine reptiles, and not one page described or named a new taxon; four chapters in Ancient Marine Reptiles are purely descriptive, serving only to give names to, or to revise, a single genus or species.

If there is a critical flaw in this edited volume, if there is one feature where it drifts from the tradition of Williston's book, this is it. Simply put, these four chapters should have been published as journal contributions, leaving more space for the remaining 13 synthetic chapters. To my mind, an up-to-date assessment of a particular field should focus on the contrast between observation and theory; innovation is found in the distillation and synthesis of disparate data points and the resulting generation of new questions. It is a pity that there was not more room in this volume to address these contrasts in depth.

Nevertheless, I applaud this volume. Most chapters are well written and pertinent. The figures are informative and the references accurate. Highlights include the chapters by McGowan and by Motani, which provide excellent reviews and interpretations of new faunas and data sets; Rieppel's chapter on Triassic sauropterygians, even though it barely reviews his recent mountain of revisionary publications; and Bell's chapter on mosasaur phylogeny, which unfortunately only scratches the surface of his PhD thesis, with no discussion of the implications of his character analysis.

The last four chapters, with a lengthy introduction by Massare, reveal the main palaeobiological issues underlying the study of ancient marine reptiles. Did fins evolve to legs and back to fins again? And what was more important, homoplasy or homology? Selection or constraint? Unique morphologies or modifications of the old? Marine reptiles are a model system for posing a broad range of questions about the evolution of tetrapods in aquatic environments. We often consider cetaceans or pinnipeds in this light, yet forget that ichthyosaurs were ‘dolphin-like’ about 190 million years before the first proto-dolphin even thought of going for a swim.