Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth
This is a sumptuous and learned book. But it is also unreadable. It serves as a visually beautiful reference book, and a thick-volume to be thumbed through, read in parts, consulted, and used as a stimulus to the sense of wonder.
“Prehistoric Life” consists of about 500 richly illustrated colored pages that include many explanatory units of boxed-in text. The book starts with the origin of the Earth, and has separate sections for each of the geological time periods, starting with the Archean, four billion years ago, and ending with the history of our species, Homo sapiens. Every page you open to is colorful and filled with images of fossils, plants, animals or artistic reproductions of life forms, and every page has scientific text amplifying each separate picture. The scope of this book and the level of knowledge that it contains is astounding and leaves the reader struck with both the artistry of book-making and the rigor of science that is involved with the creation of this text. There is no single author, and as is usual with DK Books, there are many authors, scientific consultants, editors, designers, illustrators, and photographers who had to cooperate to make this rich compendium. Unfortunately, as again is usually true with DK Books, the reader does not know which author or authority wrote the particular prose passage that one is reading. The acknowledgments alone take up three pages of four columns each.
Partly because of the encyclopedic information that is discussed, and partly because of the use of text to accompany illustrations, rather than the creation of a continuous single author narrative, this book can be read only in a halting, jumping, discontinuous manner.
“Prehistoric Life” contains many excellent features beyond its lush beauty and its factual depth. Every section of geologic history begins with its own map of the globe at that point in time, with a clear time chart, and with a discussion of how the continents and oceans were behaving in continental drift, and what the climate was like. Therefore the reader is not simply guided to pictures of plants and animals, but is constantly reminded of the interactions between geology, climatology, and the evolution of plants and animals.
The overall impact of this book is thrilling. It puts the individual reader’s life into the perspective of our planet’s life. It makes us grateful for the accumulation of scientific knowledge, the vast majority of which is less than 200 years old. Both the topic and the minds that clarified it are radiant additions to one’s sense of who one is and how human life has come to be. The information content seems up to date and impeccable.
In a book that covers almost everything, 500 glossy pages is not too long, so obviously there is an arbitrary selection of what is included and what is short changed. For example, the stunningly beautiful forty pages on human evolution show the photographs of the exact skulls that have been used to define the earlier species of humankind. Many books discuss the issue of human evolution but few illustrate it with such high color photography. On the other hand, you may find that your favorite dinosaur, or your favorite Pleistocene megafauna has not been included even though there was space enough for the editors to give many pages to something as obscure as carboniferous invertebrates.
Pouring over this book has been a delightful, sobering, incomprehensible, and exhilarating experience for me. It is the perfect complement to a book on the sense of wonder.
Reviewed by Paul R. Fleischman author of "Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant
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