Customer Reviews

The Simon & Schuster Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Creatures: A Visual Who's Who of Prehistoric Life

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book looked great at first, but then, on closer inspection, the drawings are second-rate, the information is thin, and the inaccuracies mount. Yet, there are no real alternatives that seek to comprehensively catalogue ancient life. I'd still buy it, but my enthusiasm has waned.

Several months after acquiring the book I leaf through it and wonder how I could have given it such a high rating as I did. It has flaws throughout!

- The book appears to have a drastic shortage of species to list - it is only half as thick as Simon and Schuster's Encyclopedia of Animals - despite the fact that on numerous occasions they list but one or two species from a thirty-species family;

- The art is severely degraded from the above mentioned encyclopedia of animals. While I can see the puzzlement concerning the colors of the creatures' hides, there is no excuse for the the sloppy drawings of several of the animals! If you make a conjecture, please, be sure to follow through! On several of the animals the hair cover fails to obey the laws of physics, and most of the amphibians look like a horrid joke.

- The information is sketchy at best - on numerous occasions special biological mechanisms are mentioned (like a new jaw bone arrangement for the fishes, and the skull structures of the early land animals), yet are never explained in function. Almost all species are captioned with the basics like weight and dimensions followed with senseless filler.

- The between-section class summarizations and the cladistic graphs are also very, very basic. While I understand that the book was not intended for specialists, even the basic layman will find the charts a bit "dumbed down".

This book is flashy and artful, but lacking, lacking a great lot.

This volume is the best one I've found on prehistoric creatures. Having always been fascinated by them, I wanted as an adult to find something to broaden the base I'd built as a kid obsessed with Tyrannosaurus and trilobites. Though I'm far from a paleontologist or even a biologist (my own training is in anthropology and linguistics) I find this book a pleasure to browse and consult.

Beginning with the earliest worm-like organisms and evolving through the early fish, amphibians and armored sea creatures, the book continues on up through dinosaurs, Pleistocene megafauna and finally simians and hominids. The desciptions are brief but seem informative, but it is the quality of the artwork that I value most. I never tire of looking at the colorful depictions of the denizens of Devonian swamps, Ordovician seas and Jurassic forests.

So, while I cannot pretend to be an authority, and though I certainly must defer some credibility and ask that you look at my review in conjunction with those of my fellow critics who disagree, I offer my personal recommendation on this book to any person interested in prehistoric life and what it must have been like.

I have been looked for such a book for a long time, and now I have it. Reading this book is delightful, as it gives you plenty of informations about prehistoric animals in a very attractive manner. You have very nice pictures of all animals, with a short explanation giving all essential data about them (size, anatomic singularities, food habits, ...). In addition, extremely interesting introducing sections give you a vision of each branch of animals, together with explanations on the evolutionary process concerning them.

This very up-to-date pictorial guide to now disappeared animals is a treasure for anybody interested in evolution and diversification of life. It gives you enough matter to become a specialist in this domain ! If you want to have one book on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, make it be this one.

It's hard to understand why some reviewers thought this book sucked. Someone complained that in one case a single species was described from a thirty-species family; was a 300-page book on all prehistoric vertebrates expected to list every species of every family? The artwork is in most cases very good; the color patterns given the animals are, if anything, too conservative, when one considers the panorama of color seen in modern life. In my opinion the illustrations of the dinosaurs themselves are some of the best I have seen. No, none has feathers, because at the time of printing this body covering was not yet known for dinosaurs (at any rate, the choice to give dinosaurs feathers is still very much a matter of opinion for most dinosaurs). Some of the amphibians do look like a horrid joke; that is because some of them really did look like a horrid joke. This is an excellent book, and the only reason I can see for the harsh criticism is dislike for Dougal Dixon.

I have always longed for such a book. Probably it's a grave mistake on my part to make that the firt sentense of a review, but still. I daresay, anyone who has ever been in the very least intereste in paleontology has always longed for this sort of tome. The authors have satisfied both our love of visuals ( pictures are abundant - they accompiny every entry, in full blazing color by very trustworthy artists, generally sure to catch anyone's eye) and our love of the unknown ( this is the first non-specialist book that I have seen that goes beyond the everyday banal creatures like the pachycephalosaurus and the pterosaurids). This book is sheer pleasure while doing any sort of research, even for the specialists who need solid information. Perhaps there isn't quite enough data with every entry ( due to page limits), but the information that is included is accurate and up-to-date. This is a very good book.