I want to learn more about prehistoric animals, so sure, why not check this one out?
In this book, Palmer takes us in a trip through time by showcasing some of the many extinct prehistoric creatures, roughly in order and by species/type. Each species gets an illustration, a small subsection and there's also larger pieces of text adding more depth and context to the time period.
Overall a very good book. It delivers precisely what it needs to and despite being for children it took its audience seriously and I learned a lot, especially about dinosaurs, a topic I'm not super knowledgeable on. While there's only a limited amount of species featured and they don't all get a whole lot of text dedicated to them individually, there's still a lot of information in this book.
The illustrations are also very nice and add a whole lot to the book, with neat reconstructions of what each species might've looked like in life. Honestly, I think my only real gripe regarding this book is that at one point they mislabeled one of the species featured as a "steppe lion" (more commonly called a cave lion), however the drawing in question very obviously depicted a saber-toothed cat of some kind (possibly Smilodon), with the long protruding fangs and short tails they have. Later on in the book the same species re-appears and is correctly labeled as a saber-tooth (I forget the exact species), but in this first case they labeled what is clearly not a lion as a lion. Cave lions did possibly look a bit different from our current lions, but they didn't have the appearance of a Smilodon-like felid.
Overall still a really good book, still, despite this one mix-up. I definitely recommend it if the topic interests you! Even though I'm not really into dinosaurs (I picked up this book more so to learn about prehistoric mammals such as ice age megafauna than dinosaurs) it was still an engaging read, so I'd say: give it a shot.
Rating: 4/5
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