DK Publishing's 3-Volume Set on Prehistoric Life

Jan: Beautiful and informative for sure!

United States on Nov 18, 2023

Karen: Absolutely superb book covering every aspect of prehistory from earliest moments through bacteria and beyond. I bought it to accompany an online course I am doing and they compliment each other really well. And it's got plenty of info about dinosaurs ... which didn't become extinct as one branch descended into the feathery little creatures that wake you with the dawn chorus and feed from your bird table. Next time you see two robins squabbling over territory imagine what they are really thinking.

United Kingdom on Jul 30, 2022

Sparkly Raven: This book is profusely illustrated with many pictures of dinos, skeletons, and fossils. The dino illustrations are high quality and look like they probably are 3d graphics, or at least some of them. It's divided into all the periods of Earth's history and lists a different dino on every page. It has a decent amount of text. This book is a great coffee table dino book. The only problem with this book is that it's so big and heavy and has so many pages and information, I don't have time to read it all. This thing weights almost 6 pounds but it feels more like 20 pounds. I think I'd rather have a digital version that I can browse on my computer.

United States on Apr 03, 2022

dan carlton: This is a beautiful book. It is full of pictures and artist's reconstructions of how things might have looked. There is a mild amount of text, but mostly pictures. You might need another book that discusses things in a little more depth. Now a niggling complaint. Each epoch or era, e.g. Cambrian, has a map of the world spread across two pages. The map shows what is thought to be the position of the continents as they at that time. Two pages is great idea because the map is bigger, but also dumb because lots of the map vanishes in the book binding and is hard to see. I think I would prefer a one page map.

United States on Dec 03, 2021

Jacqueline: Compre este libro para regalar venía perfectamente sellado, además me dieron un separador, tiempo de entrega fue el indicado llego antes de navidad

Mexico on Jan 12, 2020

Hans Willgeroth: Only fraction of price in Germany.
Superb photographies of fossils.
Enormous enrichment of private paleology studies.

Germany on Jul 02, 2019

EAG: O livro é , extremamente interessante , completo e bem ilustrado , está na lingua inglesa . Porém sei um pouco sobre inglês , e acabo aprendendo um pouco mais , e ''junto ''com paleontologia , paleoantropologia e paleobotânica , assuntos que me interesso e acaba que fica ainda mais interessante , o livro abrange o PRÉ - CAMBRIANO , CAMBRIANO , NEOGENE , PALEOGNE /? , MESOZOICO , PALEOLITICO E 7 MYA á 10.000 (aa) .
Livro completo , abrangente e para interessados e especialistas , não me surpreendi quando descobri que era o mais importado .

Brazil on Jul 22, 2018

Drow_male: Aunque no estoy demasiado acostumbrado a leer en inglés, me parece bastante ameno. Además, es muy completo: abarca fósiles de toda la historia de la Tierra, centrándose en el Fanerozoico (obviamente) pero sin perder de vista el Precámbrico. La introducción (con la formación de la Tierra, la Tectónica de Placas, los distintos procesos de fosilización...), los apartados de los fósiles y los mapas de la Tierra (muy visuales) y el capítulo de la Evolución Humana, hacen de ésta una imprescindible guía de fósiles.

Spain on Feb 18, 2018

Paul R. Fleischman M.D. author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant.: 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,...

United States on Jun 28, 2014

Robert A. Sloan: 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...

United States on Oct 20, 2013