Customer Reviews

Discovering Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Lessons of Prehistory, Expanded and Updated

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I thoroughly enjoyed the hardcover edition of this book. I haven't seen the paperback, but I thought it would be useful to cross-reference to the hardback, since Amazon didn't: Discovering Dinosaurs: in the American Museum of Natural History

The review there is close to my own reaction: this is a first-rate book. And it's available for all of $4 used. The book is a bit out-of-date -- it was published in 1995. Unless you're a specialist, you'll be fine with this book. The bones don't change, and the American Museum of Natural History still has the planet's best dinosaur collection. Handsomely produced, well-illustrated and well-written. Go for it!

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Arizona and New Mexico (USA)

After visiting the National Musuem of Natural History, I wondered about many of the claims that the museum made. So I decided to read a book about the "terrible lizards" and found out what I had guessed -- the study of dinosaurs and their fossils is not an exact science and many of the fundamental questions we have about them cannot be answered, including:

How old are they? How fast were they? How big were they? What did they look like? What color were they? What is their relation to birds? How are fossils aged? Do we have any dinosaur DNA?

The authors of this book do a good job at trying to answer many of these questions about dinosaurs, but in the end their explanations merely lay out the science of guesswork. The first part of this book is fifty questions about dinosaurs, and I would recommend this section to anyone interested in the subject. The next two sections are about dinosaurs digs and specific dinosaur species, and is a little bit extensive for the "casual dino reader."