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new book purchases - o what a wild n zany Friday nite



Not.     :-)

But anyway, while the female of the species went
looking for shoes and a dress, I scanned the ailes of the Barnes & Noble.  
Seeing that neither the "Science" or the "Pets/Nature" sections had anything on 
dinos (ok, if we don't count birds), I took a deep breath and walked over to 
the Children's section.  There, not even in the "young adults" area, mind you, 
but in the truly kiddie section, they had their dino books.

Prof. Holtz's book was there - I thought, I should move this a few shelves over 
to restore some dignity, but the cashier was eying me like a hungry coyote, so 
I didn't make waves.  Hey, at least they had a copy.

However, among the truly childish pop-up dreck (to me) was an updated companion 
book to an earlier book,
THE CHILDREN'S DINOSAUR ENCYCLOPEDIA, consultant: Michael Benton Ph.D.
It's a nice little tome published by DK entitled  DINOSAUR ATLAS, again, with 
consultant: Michael Benton Ph.D., that also has an interactive CD-Rom 
(360-degree shots of the animals and how they moved).  It has sort of a 'fake 
book' format with some transparency overlap of the bones of several of the 
dinos that fit over a paleo-artist reconstruct of what they may have looked 
like, and a nice rather bland overview of the Mesozoic.   I'm a sucker for 
these general encyclopedia things if they have nice artwork and as long as they 
are at least on the teenage level - this one would appeal to 12 yr-olds and 
older, IMHO.

Now, the other book I picked up is the Tim Haines & Paul Chambers overview from 
their various "Walking With ..." tv specials called
THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO PREHISTORIC LIFE.  Great graphics, and some nice text 
(just scanned thru it so far) made it worth buying to me, but, as the first 
printing was from 2005, why weren't the erroneous "facts" from WWD about 
Liopleurodon corrected??  By that date they'd been rolled over the coals about 
not being accurate on this puppy.  Are they just doing it for spite?  Also, 
although many are well-drawn, others of the "to scale" beast-outline to 
man-outline relative size comparisons are hopelessly wrong.  Liopleurodon now 
looks about the size of a WW I u-boat.  Tarbosaurus has a Godzilla-like posture 
and can look over a 4-story building.  And the comparison for Argentinosaurus 
is just stupid.  In this, it   looks like it should be having trouble walking 
without causing tremour stoppng consultant: Michael Benton Ph.D. wher id. 
Ha ha.