Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth Paperback – July 2, 2012

Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on EarthThis 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

Exactly as described and much more comprehensive than I expected. Deep, thorough listings of so many creatures I hadn't heard of and most, if not all of the ones I was familiar with, even obscure ones. Unfortunately a few of the absent ones are favorites, I could not find Utahraptor in there because groups like raptors got only two or three representative species as opposed to the several famous species that they really did.The illustrations surprised me because I didn't read the fine print. I expected a variety of paleo-art in different styles or one or two artists dominating. Instead, it's lush and photo-heavy with gorgeous computer created, realistic images. Most of them are photographic and natural looking, as if you had a camera you sent throughout the past. A few look obviously digital-painted but many are so well crafted they might as well be good nature photography. Poses, textures, lighting, color harmony, light physics, it's all very real. Very few have unnatural hard edges to give it away.In addition there are many good photos of fossils, skeletal mounts and museum reconstructions, occasional taxidermy photos if a species was extant recently enough to have taxidermy in museums. The text is concise but information packed and engaging. This is most of all a wonderful reference book. .It's well indexed and bound. Thick, heavy and intense but an easy read. It's laid out so that it's easy to look up something specific by its time period and it covers the plants and ecology as well as the animals.I am a writer, what I wanted in a reference book, this is the best one yet. With the detailed descriptions and fossils of undersea life and botany as well as land animals, it's easier to get a feel for the entire period on something I've looked up. When I set a story or novel in Earth's evolutionary past, this is the book that gives me enough detail I'm less likely to make huge blunders like putting in Jurassic grass.I bought this to replace a rather old Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Life which had mostly line drawings but was comprehensive and covered all the major periods and groups of animals. I found myself turning to it more often than denser books because of how well it was organized and that it covered more than the Mesozoic. This one is bigger. Its large size gives room for more text and the blocks of text are often in relatively small type,often white on black. I wear magnifying glasses to read the text sometimes but it's always worth reading and goes into just that step more depth to make everything fall together well.It's nicely up to date, lushly illustrated and tremendously handy. I can't recommend it enough to the interested layman and it might even be useful to scientists and fossil hunters too with its wonderful breadth.

This is a fantastic book, even used, available for a low price. It appears to contain a comprehensive fossil record of the entire panorama of life on Earth. All of the major representative fossils are shown, along with computer-generated artists' renditions of the life forms and habitats represented by the fossils. Not only is the formation of the Earth about 4.56 billion years ago illustrated, but also the formation of our entire solar system. Visuals tell most of the story, but they are accompanied by brief but succinct verbal notes and comments along the way. At the end are a glossary, a thorough index, and an apparently comprehensive list of at least most of the dinosaurs. This book presents an understandable, mostly visual, fossil record of life on Earth, and as such it could be used to support the teaching of Darwinian evolution, even with modern modifications, such as "punctuated equilibrium." I recommend it for anyone interested in biology, or as a gift for a student in high school or higher. One more thing: while presenting a thorough sampling of the empirical evidence, it also discusses competing theories about various phenomena, and acknowledges what is NOT known, as well as what is known.