TALES OF THE PREHISTORIC WORLD

Landmark discoveries in paleontology, from multibillion-year-old stromatolites to a woolly mammoth tooth no more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids.

After a general timeline and a rundown of the “big five” extinction events, paleontologist Moore covers the story of prehistoric life in roughly chronological single topic spreads. She focuses mainly on lesser known tales of discovery, such as the Precambrian fossils found by 19th-century schoolchildren in England’s Charnwood Forest, and also highlights spectacular finds at unusually rich sites like Angeac-Charente in France, where 73,000 specimens have been recovered, and Oregon’s Turtle Cove Assemblage. Thorns tucks an occasional light- or dark-skinned human figure in for scale but fills up most pages with an abundance of full-body animal portraits—not always to relative scale but rendered in lifelike poses and with reasonable, usually brightly colored naturalism. Readers curious about the deep history of microbes, plants, and fungi will have to look elsewhere, and our hominin story is limited to three skimpy spreads. Still, along with extinct stars like Titanoboa and Megalodon, special features such as a lineup comparing the very different original and modern concepts of what certain dinosaurs looked like and a gallery of wildly shaped and hued ceratopsian heads will please both fledgling and confirmed dinophiles. And the named and depicted paleontologists here include nearly as many women as men. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An insider’s view of exciting sites and finds, with prehistoric portraits aplenty to match.