Customer Reviews

Atlas of the Prehistoric World

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It is a little-known fact that most of the dinosaurs in the film "Jurassic Park" are actually from the Cretaceous period, millions of years later.

That is one thing I learned from the ''Atlas of the Prehistoric World,'' a coffe-table book from The Discovery Channel's publishing imprint.

The highlights of the book, of course, are the lavish illustrations, which chart the movement of the world's contients from before the forming of the Pangean supercontinent to modern times -- and which always show you where things were in relation to where they are today.

It's a little awe-inspiring to realize just how much change the world has undergone in just the last 620 million years.

A bit less impressive, unfortunately, are the sections later on that explain what forms of life were around at what periods of time. Author Douglas Palmer's text probably is as detailed as that you'll find in any other coffee-table volume, but that isn't saying much. Books like this always excel at pictures and disappoint with the explanatory text. In this case, the text reads like something intended for intelligent junior-high students, which may not be a bad thing if you are one or are buying this book for one.

Anyway, if prehistoric times interest you, you'll probably find, as do I, that the illustrations' merits outweigh the text's faults.

This is an excellent buy for natural science enthusiasts. It has been arranged in splended fashion, with large scale maps, great illustrations, and more and less detailed sections of text-depending on the tastes of the reader, in different sections of the book. It contains beautifully coloured palaeogeographic maps of the contintents (eg if you are one of those people who likes to know where Alaska was on the earth 250 million years ago), and a fairly detailed notes and reference section at the back, where historical outlines, scientific debates, stories, glossary, biological, and other technical information is discussed. There is descriptions throughout of famous fossils, fossil sites, major historic finds, scientific debates, the origin of life, the Burgess Shale, the ediacra fauna, the Cambrian explosion, dinosaurs, mammals and their origins, birds and their evolution, the K-T and other mass extinction events,the rise of the hominids, the ice ages, and so on.

The authors have done a really 1st class job in packing in so much information, arranged in a way that can be understood and perused according to the tastes of the reader. Not to mention the fantastic illustrations/and or real photographs-from in situ-stegosaur fossil finds, to early Cambrian Hallucegenia, to T rex skeletons, to giant kangaroos, to mammoths being dug out of the Russian steppes, to Mongolian dinosaur eggs, to Hominid illustrations on the African savannah.

A fantastic book, one well above the average 'atlas'-type compilation, for both scientists and the general reader.

I found this book delightful. While not as hard hitting or as "meaty" as Fortey's Life or the recent Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs, it does provide a nice overview in coffee-table-book-format of life on earth. I liked how it presented the fauna and flora for each geologic period, illustrating a particular environment for a given location in that time period, such as the Ghost Ranch fauna in Triassic New Mexico or the Vendian fauna from Precambrian Australia. I particularly liked the Riversleigh marsupial fauna and the Eocene Messel fauna (and flora too) of Germany.

There are many nice maps of the Earth throughout its history showing the appearence and disappearance of the continents, tracing the rise and fall of Pangea, Gondwanaland, and Laurasia.

The book has several appendices about a number of subjects, such as volcanoes, plate tectonics, fossil formation, sedminentation, and biographies of major paleonotologists. They are rather basic, but help make this a great book for those new to prehistoric life and would make this an excellent text for middle school or high school students.

You can use this book as a very basic means to learn some interesting basic paleontology (really, folks, that's not a word that should be associated with boredom). Or, use it as I do as an excellent reference tool.

The book begins with almost fifty pages of global maps showing the position of the continents and the condition of earth from Precambrian times to the present. Most of the rest of the book is devoted to picturing and describing life forms during the same periods. Chapters at the end of the book deal with plate tectonics, types of rock, fossils and dating techniques and many other appropriate subjects. And yes, dinosaur fans, there is a section on the K-T boundary, that period 65 million years ago when the Chicxulub meteorite ended their reign.

I'm currently reading a book on oceanography, in which the author describes a late Cambrian creature called Hallucigenia which had stiff spikes on one side and flexible appendages on the other side. The creature was so strange that for a long time scientists could not determine which sides were top or bottom. There was no picture of this oddity in my oceanography book, and being very curious about Hallucigenia's appearance I grabbed my Atlas of the Prehistoric world. Sure enough, there was a good picture of the fossil. The atlas is packed with fossil photos and artistic renderings of what these creatures probably looked like. Paper quality and layout are excellent, and I like the fact that each section is presented by earth's ages. Trying to remember just what the Devonian period is famous for? Finding the answer (it is fish) is easy.

I had my doubts about this book when I received it. It seemed to
be a child's book. However, reading it my first impression quicly went away. Its colourfulness makes it a good, amusing reading; the good paleo-art is combined with good scientific standards, and I learned a lot from it.
There are two things that I would like to suggest for a later edition:
1 ) I would like to see some taxonomic trees. That would help me to understand a few things that weren't clear from reading the book. For instance, did the synapsids evolve from reptiles, or were they never reptiles, and evolved directly from aphibian ancestry? Perhaps some explanation on the cladistics studies that have been made is in order.
I think the taxonomic trees would make relationships between the different families and animals clearer. And I would appreciate trees not centered on mammals, but showing these on par with all the other big divisions that evolved from the amphibians, like the lizards, birds, turtles, etc (some of which we group under that ill-defined label of "Reptiles").
2 ) My other complaint has to do with precisely this human self-centrism: did the fish stoped evolving after the Devonian? I understand that the book needs some sort of direction, but I think the formula "first microbes" -> "us " (which this book has to some point evaded) is a tired one, and forgets too many branches, and perhaps the most important, of life's evolution. For instance, I would like to see a few pages on the evolution of plants, which had a major influence on the evolution of animals (where would we be without that great invention, the tree?).
But I agree that space in this book is limited, and its intended readership wide, so given that, I think a good compromise was reached, with the exception of the taxonomic trees.

Atlas of the Prehistoric World written by Douglas Palmer is a Discovery Channel book that is colorfully, highly illustrated book that takes us on a short 4.6 billion year tour of the earth and is life forms. From the earliest time when the earth had nothing on it to today where man is the dominant species living.

Reading this book you'll find out how mountain ranges form, how volcaoes erupt, how the continents splits apart, how meteorites crashed into the earth and how life was affected. There is a lot of information inside these pages and it is easily assimilated.

The book is divided into three major sections making each time period distinctive in its own right. First is "The Changing Globe" where we see how the earth changed throughout time. The shifting topography is highly illustrative as we see the geology change with time. Taking us from Vendian Times to the Quaternary Times though all times with colorful computer generated snapshots.

Next the section of "Ancient Worlds" takes us from Aquatic Microbes: Life begins to the end of the ice age. This is where you'll find out about not only dinosaurs but early mammals to humans. The next section is the "Earth Fact File" where you'll find out how the people who look into the past find and get their information about the past and bring it to life for us to read about.

This book has some excellent short biographies of the people in history who started putting this information together, also there is a listing of websites to visit, making this book a good sourse for futher information. There is a further reading list so you can extend your reading about the information in this book and of course there is a glossary that explains the terminology used within the text of the book.

This is an excellent book to learn about earth's past and it is worthy of your reference library.

For anyone with an interest in paleontology, this book is very good. For anyone with an interest in paleogeography, the book is indispensible and a treasure.
The 50 pages of maps, while assuredly based in some part on learned conjecture, provide an unmatchable sense of the history of drifting continents and where these may have been located at various points in deep time. For example, one can view the formations in the Colorado Plateau, and read innumerable treatises on them, but only when this book illustrates where North America was during the Triassic and Jurassic periods does the arrangement and appearance of rock beds in such places as Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks make easy sense. Even absent any other reason, if you are reading this review, you owe it to yourself to buy this book.

This book is actually pretty hard to find these days. When I did finally get a used copy, I found the illustrations and information to be only OK as a reference point for continental drift and prehistory. I also found that the info on prehistoric animals barely touchs on each prehistoric period.
I purchased the book for its continental drift information and maps. In this area, I am a little disappointed. The maps provided do not show the complete landmass of each period. Each map only shows half of the Earth, and the other half is never shown in a separate map. Not being able to see the whole landmass for each period is a little annoying given that this is the main purpose for the book.
The book provides very general and unnecessarily incomplete information on prehistoric Earth's many ages.

I bought this book as a layperson without much knowledge of prehistoric geology. This book is fairly simple to understand without using alot of "big words". It is made for easier reading as a reference guide into prehistoric geology and paleobiology. I found it to be a great guide if you are interested in geology and prehistory.

The book takes you through each time period in the geologic time scale from the Precambrian up to the Pleistocene period. Then after the geological periods it gives a little background on physical geology. There is alot of colorful pictures and illustrations to guide you along with the text.

This is a very interesting book that I recommend if you are interested in this type of reading. Another hit for the Discovery Channel!

This book has it all: the physical history of the earth as the continents moved about the planet and the evolution of life (the rise and fall of all sorts of species of animals). It's up to date and has copious (and beautiful) illustrations and diagrams.

Geology and palentology buffs will enjoy owning it.