An excellent novel by Robert T. Bakker. Raptor Red depicts the life of a young female raptor, through the raptor's eyes. The reader is brought step by step through every amazing thought of the powerful beasts. Survival of the fittest is painted in horrifying detail. A read I would reccomend to any Everything2.com noder. Here's the synopsis from the back:

Painting a rich and colorful picture of a lush prehistoric world, leading paleontologist Robert T. Bakker tells his story from within Raptor Red's extraordinary tale. From a tragic loss to the fierce struggle for survival to a daring migration to the Pacific Ocean to escape a deadly new predator, Raptor Red combines fact and fiction to capture for the first time the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of the most magnificent, enigmatic, creatures ever to walk the face of the Earth.

Raptor Red is a novel by Robert T. Bakker, published in 1994, detailing the life of a female Utahraptor dinosaur. The book is somewhat novel in concept, since books written for adults, detailing the life of an animal, are somewhat rare. The author of the book, Robert T. Bakker, is a very famous paleontologist and dinosaur expert, but that doesn't necessarily translate into being a good fiction writer.

In my view, Dr. Bakker pulls it off. He portrays his raptors as being emotionally complex enough that he has not written just an adventure story, but has written a novel, where the main character has a personality, and undergoes character development. This is partly due to Bakker's theories about dinosaur intelligence, that raptors were intelligent, social animals, and also because he was writing a novel, and a totally prosaic description of raptor life might not have made very good reading. I imagine that his editor may have had a strong input in adding human interest (so to speak) to his scientific theories.

If the novel actually fails, it probably fails in the direction of being too tied up in the characters and narrative, rather than of being too scientific. Although Bakker makes frequent and explicit mention of the biologically determined nature of raptor behavior, he also seems to want to stick to some typical character tropes. The plot of the book, such as it is, revolves around a woman (the titular raptor red) who is dealing with that fact that her sister doesn't like her boyfriend. And despite their dangers, they usually manage to slip through, sometimes with help from an angelic pteradactyl that looks over them.

Overall, the book is both a good book to understand an important part of natural history, and is also a very fun book to read.

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