I was originally planning on reviewing Brusatte's "Day of the Dinosaurs: Step into a spectacular prehistoric world" (henceforth DD) the way I usually review bad dino books. However, I then remembered that Kirkus's DD review is so perfect (especially when it comes to criticizing the paleoart & writing: [Google "DAY OF THE DINOSAURS | Kirkus"] ) that I can't possibly top it, so I won't even try. Instead, in this review, I'll point you to Kirkus's DD review & add my own thoughts as well:
-The paleoart is annoyingly inconsistent in 2 major ways: 1) The appearance of a given environment (I.e. Sometimes, the ground is a darker color than the sky or the water; Other times, it's a lighter color; Still other times, they're so similar in color that it's hard to tell which is which); 2) The appearance of a given species (E.g. Ceratosaurus has relatively-long limbs sometimes, but more normally-proportioned limbs other times).
-The paleoart is also annoyingly outdated/abominable. This is especially apparent in the shrink-wrapped heads of 1) the sauropods like Cetiosaurus because they're also depicted with fat & shapeless bodies (See the front cover), & 2) the ornithischians like Triceratops because, despite their beaks & cheeks, even they're depicted with big exposed teeth.
-The paleoart is also annoyingly anachronistic. This is especially apparent in the "EARLY-MIDDLE JURASSIC" chapter. In it, 2 Early Jurassic North American Dilophosaurus stalk a Middle Jurassic English Cetiosaurus.*
-The "FIELD NOTES" part of each chapter reminds me of the Holtz quote below. More specifically, showing accurate skeletal reconstructions & inaccurate life reconstructions side-by-side shows how much they conflict with each other.
-In reference to the annoyingly "forced value judgements", the worst 1 is about Dorygnathus (1st, see the Brusatte quote below; Then, google "Dorygnathus tweets its way through development" for why it's the worst).
-The text is annoyingly hit-&-miss in terms of getting the facts straight: Sometimes, it's contradicted by the paleoart (E.g. "Heterodontosaurus...is fluffy, covered with what look like long hairs all over its body"); Other times, it's just plain wrong (E.g. The Brusatte quote about Velociraptor; Google "The Predatory Ecology of Deinonychus" for more info).
-If you want a good alternative to DD, get Bakker's "The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs" (which I reviewed: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2INIHTO7ANTSM/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8 ).
*Even if they did live together (which they didn't), Dilophosaurus was a predator of relatively-small prey.
Quoting Holtz (Google "SD: Holtz's A Dinosaur Lover's Bookshelf"): "Paleoart is, admittedly, a difficult enterprise: after all, its subject matter is long dead, and science can never expect to know very much about the creaturers' external surfaces or, for that matter, any of their other perishable features. Nevertheless, there is one inviolate rule of dinosaur restoration: if the known fossil skeleton conflicts with the shape of the reconstruction, the reconstruction must be wrong. That rule gives the casual reader at least a fighting chance of separating the wheat from the chaff: distinguishing books that depict restorations consistent with fossil specimens from books that have more in common with medieval bestiaries, conjured from rumor and imagination alone. One reliable clue that a book belongs to the former group is the inclusion of drawings or photographs of the fossil skeletons on which the restorations are based."
Quoting Brusatte: "You turn your head in disgust as you put down your binoculars. There is no other way to put it: the flying animal you have seen is ugly. It kind of looks like a big furry bat. This is Dorygnathus, a type of pterosaur."
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Customer reviews
I love the artwork and the colors. Informative with all sorts of dino-info. Starts at the beginning of dinosaurs and ends with the evolution of dinosaurs into birds. I love that there’s a timeline and family tree in the beginning of the book. There is only one page I don’t love- it’s basically all yellow which makes it so there’s not a lot of destination between land, water and dinosaur. Other than that, it’s a beautiful book.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 23, 2021
Illustrations In Line with the Cover
By Mother of 2 on July 23, 2021
I love the artwork and the colors. Informative with all sorts of dino-info. Starts at the beginning of dinosaurs and ends with the evolution of dinosaurs into birds. I love that there’s a timeline and family tree in the beginning of the book. There is only one page I don’t love- it’s basically all yellow which makes it so there’s not a lot of destination between land, water and dinosaur. Other than that, it’s a beautiful book.
By Mother of 2 on July 23, 2021
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 18, 2018
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 22, 2020
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 20, 2019
