Atlas of the Prehistoric World (Hardcover)

~ Douglas Palmer (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The earth is not the spring chicken it was 4.6 billion years ago. With the passing of the millennia, earth's face, weathered by heat and ice and subject to tectonic friction, has erupted, wrinkled, and sagged, as do all our faces ultimately, only more so. Continents have shifted, merged, and split apart. Seas have turned to land and land has been submerged by seas. And microorganisms have evolved into the vast diversity of flora and fauna that exists today. Douglas Palmer's Atlas is a digest of what is known so far about the history of the earth, enhanced with brilliant maps, photographs, and illustrations, and explained in lucid, enjoyable prose.

The Atlas starts off with "The Changing Globe," 36 beautiful pages of maps that chart the changing face of the earth from Vendian Times some 620 million years ago, when land was massed in two continents called Northern and Southern Gondwana. Flipping through the vivid pages, one sees how Siberia, during Early Cambrian Times, began to move north from its South Pole location, how in Odovician Times (460 million years ago) the Iapetus Ocean was beginning to close while the Rheic Ocean was starting to open, and how a volcano in what's now Virginia spewed volcanic ash as far away as what's now Minnesota, while in Carboniferous Times (a mere 354 million years ago), there were swampy forests in Nova Scotia that are the coal fields of today.

"Ancient Worlds," the next section of the atlas, charts life, from the aquatic microbes formed 3.5 billion years ago and the multicelled organisms of the Vendian Period, the early-Cambrian brachiopods and the Silurian spiny trilobites, on through to the Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs, the Tertiary mammals, and the entrance of hominids just 5 million years ago. The extinction of the dinosaurs is explained, the Ice Age is described, and, in the "Earth Fact File," 200 years of scientific discovery are chronicled.

Douglas Palmer, a professor of natural and earth sciences at Cambridge University, also writes science articles for Science and New Scientist, and is the author of many books on paleontology. His Atlas is an excellent layperson's reference for families and students, rendering a vast amount of history and science in a highly accessible, entertaining format. --Stephanie Gold

From School Library Journal

Grade 5 Up-This exemplary book is one of the few that provides detailed maps of the changes in the Earth's landmasses as well as chronicling the evolution of its life-forms. The opening section includes 36 pages of full-color, chronologically arranged maps. Outlines of current continents overlay those of the prehistoric landmasses, allowing readers to see how they have moved and changed over time. Commentary on individual maps and information on how to read them is included. The second section examines each geological era and time period, and includes many color photographs, reproductions, and drawings depicting their life-forms and habitats. Detailed captions and sidebars provide additional information. The final section, illustrated with black-and-white photos, reproductions, and maps, covers "Earth History," "Earth Processes" (including volcanoes), and "Fossils." Paragraph-length biographies of noted paleontologists and geologists, and a list of museums and Web sites to visit are appended. For its price, this is the best atlas of Laurentia and Gondwana around.
Cathryn A. Camper, formerly at Minneapolis Public Library
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Random House, Inc.; 1st edition (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563318296
• ISBN-13: 978-1563318290
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 9.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #376,955 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A coffee-table book for dinosaur geeks, December 12, 1999

By	Thomas Harris (Athens, AL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good intro on prehistoric life, February 28, 2001

By	Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cut well above the average, August 31, 2000

By	Roger McEvilly (the guilty bystander) (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

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.