The Wild Life of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals

"There are a lot of dinosaur books out there for kids, for good reasons. They’re very inspiring and fascinating for young readers. But what we really liked with this book is that it sets the dinosaurs in a much broader context. There are plenty of dinosaurs in here, but the book covers all of prehistoric life. You can dip in and find the bits on dinosaurs you want, but it also gives an appreciation that ancient life is much more than that. I really enjoyed that there were some quite wacky things in here. “What has five eyes, no legs and a trunk?” You sort of think of a very unusual elephant, but it’s an opabinia, a really weird creature that we’ve got fossil records for from the Cambrian period and we get to marvel at several other of the wacky body plans that life tried out during the Cambrian explosion, too, which is something I only learned about as a graduate student. The cartoon style works really well. It makes it fun, makes it approachable, and has a sense of time in it as well. I was a bit nervous that Steve, who is a dinosaur expert, would find stuff wrong in this book, being such an expert, but he loved this book as well — he was really enthusiastic about it. Yes, I think maybe that’s coming across a bit."