Dinosaur!

by David Norman

Full-color photos. "From cover to cover, this openly invites the reader to discover the delights of dinosaurs. The visual appeal is impressive. The text is informative. Fossilization, skeleton reconstruction, and a superb time scale round out a stunning and compelling book. Complete, authoritative, exact, and imaginative, it is sure to survive when other dinosaur books become extinct."--(starred) "Science Books & Films."

Genres: Science, Dinosaurs, Palaeontology, Nonfiction, Biology, Audiobook, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

David Bruce Norman is a British paleontologist, currently the main curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge University. From 1991 to 2011, Norman has also been the Sedgwick Museum's director.

There is more than one author with this name.

Reviews

[Laurence Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

For its time, the book explains how science (including the scientists) figured out how the dinosaurs would look like, how they move etc. this changed all throughout the decades until we reach the current state of what are dinosaurs.

[GoldGato · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to books on dinosaurs, you can usually choose between collections blistered with pictures or weighty scientific tomes with too many words. That's why I really enjoyed this book, as it offers a tour of the Mesozoic age and its terrible lizards. There are enough illustrations (including one stunner showing the viewpoint of raptors trying to evade being stepped on by an enormous sauropod) to keep the reader interested and the text is outstanding.

Although everything we know about dinosaurs seems to change every decade, I still pop this volume open when I am looking for dinosaur answers. There be dragons here.

Book Season = Year Round

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75/5 stars.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting book but kinda out of date, but book is old

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely the most detailed and informative of all the dinosaur books that I have read so far, even if it is not as narratively engaging as some of the others. Though some of the information is now out-dated, this book gave the clearest definition of what classifies a 'dinosaur', as well as describing the many different types and species of dinosaurs. But like I said, some of the information is rather out-dated by now. When the book was written, very little was known about the feathers of dinosaurs or even about the Yucatan meteor crater, therefore these are things that the author could only speculate on. However, this does provide a very interesting look at how different theories and ideas have evolved and changed even in just the last few decades. Overall, I do think this makes for a good reference book and is an excellent introduction to the world of dinosaurs.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good, intermediate-level book about dinosaurs. It gives a solid history of paleontology and leads the reader through the progression of how dinosaurs were viewed and researched, and how theories have changed over time. Throughout, the author provides the latest knowledge (at the time) while still making clear that theories change as new information is made available.

There's relatively little information about specific dinosaurs; this is very much a survey course of dinosaurs in general. Brachiosaurus, Deinonychus, and Iguanodon (to a lesser extent) are used as case-study-like examples to demonstrate varying theories and types of dinosaurs, along with their physiology, ecology, and lineages.

The author does a good job of creating an overall flow to the book , and it is quite accessible. Readers do not need much science background to understand the text, despite how relatively technical it gets. The art and diagrams found throughout are of very high quality - better than many dinosaur books I've read.

However, this book would have benefited from an editor. Several sections are a bit meandering and could be made much clearer (though as stated, the author does an admirable job in this regard). Also, there are a fair number of typos found throughout. These issues only stand out because it is otherwise a well written book.

The final caveat is that the book was written over 20 years ago, at this point. There is new information that the author obviously could not take into account, especially regarding the prevalence of feathered dinosaurs. This is just something to keep in mind - very little of the book's information is invalidated by this, but some prevailing theories have definitely changed in the last two decades.

[Matthew Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good intro on dinosaurs including:
-What clues they left behind, how fossils and these clues came to be left there
-How modern day animal & plant life can fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of dinosaurs
-The history of our perception & popularization of dinosaurs
-Different extinction theories.