Re: your first paleo book was:

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

My first one was some unknown no-name book with pretty pictures and 
sauropods in deep water. I was probably 7, and I wouldn't even recognize 
that book anymore because I immediately went on to read all other dinosaur 
books I was able to get.

> > The one that got me interested in the science was A Field Guide to
> > Dinosaurs by David Lambert. It's dated by now, but at the time it
> > really impressed upon me just how many types of (non-avialan) dinosaur
> > there were, beyond the half-dozen familiar ones that everyone knows.

Yes, that was very impressive! Such a book should exist on everything. :-) I 
got it for Christmas... probably 1989 (the German translation came out in 
1988, unfortunately not in the least updated from the 1983 original). Very, 
very nice layout by the anonymous Diagram Group.

Wait. 1989? I _was_ 7 years old at that time. So probably 1990 or even 1991.

> (among other things, _Troodon_ was given as an ornithopod!)

Yes, and *Dilophosaurus* and *Proceratosaurus*, like just about everything 
else, were megalosaurids. Three double pages of megalosaurids -- all other 
families have at most two! And *Avimimus* was mentioned in quite some 
detail... got me very excited...

(Though not as much as a more popular book I read... probably earlier. It 
introduced me to *Protoavis* and claimed it was _Early_ Triassic. Knowing 
that dinosaurs otherwise start in the Late Triassic, I almost invented BCF. 
Oh man, the emotions.)

And the teratosaurids were in there... I was quite surprised to find no 
trace of them in the 1993 follow-up (which, incidentally, was translated in 
the year the original came out, and which I got to read in the school 
library immediately). It also took me some time to understand that not 
everyone considered *Ornitholestes* a junior synonym of *Coelurus*. (The 
1983 book mentions a lot of junior synonyms that don't occur anywhere else 
in the book, along with all genera they are now referred to, not just the 
one the type species is referred to -- the whole book is at the genus 
level.)

> (Incidentally, on a dinosaur trivia note... this was the book in which 
> Lambert inadvertently erected the name _Coloradisaurus_ for the 
> preoccupied prosauropod genus _Coloradia_.  Apparently Lambert was aware 
> that Bonaparte had come up with the replacement name _Coloradisaurus_, but 
> he was unaware that Bonaparte had yet to publish the name.  Thus the new 
> name _Coloradisaurus_ came to be attributed to Lambert, not Bonaparte. 
> AFAIK, _Coloradisaurus_ is the first and only valid dinosaur name to be 
> coined in a popular dinosaur book.)

Really? Does he make clear enough that it's a replacement name for 
*Coloradia* Bonaparte? That's not all that easy. -- Unfortunately, I don't 
have the book with me here in Paris...