People love a good dinosaur story. Surely, after all these years, the ecological question of the number of species ought to qualify as a dinosaur. Yet, no one has ever taken the trouble to write up the glory days of species diversity work, the era of the 1960s and 1970s.

It was a time of great excitement, of elegant theories and huge promise. Modern graduate students must be curious about it. Having played a small role in it myself, I decided to have a go at it. At least, I thought, I won't have to nag my graduate students to read that primary literature anymore; I'll give them a little map of it.

I'm not sure when I realized the dinosaur was still alive. There had been a stirring here and there as I poked over the old bones and fitted a few together into an occasional new sub-assembly. But then I heard a roaring. As if attracted by an improved portrait of its progenitors, a living being reared up and spat challenges. By the time I finished this book, the dinosaur was breathing honest fire. At first, only I could hear it; after you read the book, I hope you can too.