I expected Too Big to Walk to be long-winded, and I was right. Even the padding is padded. The first half of the book recounts the history of palaeontology and, while I’d usually find that subject fascinating, I grew impatient and wished Ford would just cut the preamble and get on with it. It took him around two hundred and fifty pages to get to the point and even then he struggled to stay on topic.

It sometimes felt like he was being contrary for the sake of it. For example, he insists birds aren’t dinosaurs but his only reasoning as far as I can tell is that “no reptile has ever evolved endothermy” (so what does he think birds are, mammals?)

Much of Ford’s theory of dinosaur aquaticism seems to be based on misunderstandings. Yes, the mesozoic world was more watery than our own – there were no polar ice caps; sea levels were higher; we have evidence that Europe was an archipelago and North America was bisected by the Western Interior Seaway. That said, we must also consider the conditions necessary for fossilisation to occur. Dinosaur remains are often found in fluvial deposits not because the animals spent most of their time in the water, necessarily, but because those individuals were the ones that got preserved. The same is true of trace fossils – footprints in a sand dune are not going to fossilise but footprints in a riverbank might. It’s survivorship bias.

I don’t think his ideas are completely devoid of merit, however. Spinosaurus was semiaquatic, and that might be true of other spinosaurids to some extent. But we can’t generalise what we know about Spinosaurus and its kin to all dinosaurs, including distant relatives like Stegosaurus. I don’t know... That’s pretty much all I have to say about it. By all means investigate dinosaur aquaticism on a case-by-case basis, but I’m not convinced that all large dinosaurs lived in shallow seas. Ford demonstrates a real all-or-nothing mentality.

On that note, Ford thinks there’s a conspiracy afoot. Essentially, he believes “establishment academics” manufacture support for the field of palaeontology by making dinosaurs appear cool and exciting, thereby securing funding for research, but in order to keep up the ruse they have to crush dissent. Every slightly inaccurate dinosaur documentary is actually “pernicious propaganda” and every article which doesn’t replicate his own findings is “fake news” designed to perpetuate “terrestrial tyranny.” In the introduction to this book, he warns the reader “those palæontologists around the world are so very antagonistic to every word within, that you may have pebbles thrown at your windows if one of them spies this book in your room.” Hyperbole, no doubt, but there’s definitely some sincerity in his bitter paranoia.

I wouldn’t recommend Too Big to Walk because I’m an agent of Big Palaeontology because it’s absolutely riddled with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated conjecture presented as fact, not to mention petty grievances and the paranoia that accompanies an inflated ego. Ford presents himself as a bastion of truth bordering on martyrdom. I’d find it funny were I not genuinely concerned about the guy.