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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.