Rating: 
Summary: Atlas of the Prehistoric World
Review: Atlas of the Prehistoric World written by Douglas Palmer is a Discovery Channel book that is colorfully, highly illustrated book that takes us on a short 4.6 billion year tour of the earth and is life forms. From the earliest time when the earth had nothing on it to today where man is the dominant species living.Reading this book you'll find out how mountain ranges form, how volcaoes erupt, how the continents splits apart, how meteorites crashed into the earth and how life was affected. There is a lot of information inside these pages and it is easily assimilated. The book is divided into three major sections making each time period distinctive in its own right. First is "The Changing Globe" where we see how the earth changed throughout time. The shifting topography is highly illustrative as we see the geology change with time. Taking us from Vendian Times to the Quaternary Times though all times with colorful computer generated snapshots. Next the section of "Ancient Worlds" takes us from Aquatic Microbes: Life begins to the end of the ice age. This is where you'll find out about not only dinosaurs but early mammals to humans. The next section is the "Earth Fact File" where you'll find out how the people who look into the past find and get their information about the past and bring it to life for us to read about. This book has some excellent short biographies of the people in history who started putting this information together, also there is a listing of websites to visit, making this book a good sourse for futher information. There is a further reading list so you can extend your reading about the information in this book and of course there is a glossary that explains the terminology used within the text of the book. This is an excellent book to learn about earth's past and it is worthy of your reference library.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent informative reference!
Review: For anyone with an interest in paleontology, this book is very good. For anyone with an interest in paleogeography, the book is indispensible and a treasure.
The 50 pages of maps, while assuredly based in some part on learned conjecture, provide an unmatchable sense of the history of drifting continents and where these may have been located at various points in deep time. For example, one can view the formations in the Colorado Plateau, and read innumerable treatises on them, but only when this book illustrates where North America was during the Triassic and Jurassic periods does the arrangement and appearance of rock beds in such places as Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks make easy sense. Even absent any other reason, if you are reading this review, you owe it to yourself to buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: An unparalleled view into deep time
Review: For anyone with an interest in paleontology, this book is very good. For anyone with an interest in paleogeography, the book is indispensible and a treasure.
The 50 pages of maps, while assuredly based in some part on learned conjecture, provide an unmatchable sense of the history of drifting continents and where these may have been located at various points in deep time. For example, one can view the formations in the Colorado Plateau, and read innumerable treatises on them, but only when this book illustrates where North America was during the Triassic and Jurassic periods does the arrangement and appearance of rock beds in such places as Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks make easy sense. Even absent any other reason, if you are reading this review, you owe it to yourself to buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Facinating Reading!
Review: I bought this book as a layperson without much knowledge of prehistoric geology. This book is fairly simple to understand without using alot of "big words". It is made for easier reading as a reference guide into prehistoric geology and paleobiology. I found it to be a great guide if you are interested in geology and prehistory. The book takes you through each time period in the geologic time scale from the Precambrian up to the Pleistocene period. Then after the geological periods it gives a little background on physical geology. There is alot of colorful pictures and illustrations to guide you along with the text. This is a very interesting book that I recommend if you are interested in this type of reading. Another hit for the Discovery Channel!
Rating:
Summary: Facinating Reading!
Review: I bought this book as a layperson without much knowledge of prehistoric geology. This book is fairly simple to understand without using alot of "big words". It is made for easier reading as a reference guide into prehistoric geology and paleobiology. I found it to be a great guide if you are interested in geology and prehistory. The book takes you through each time period in the geologic time scale from the Precambrian up to the Pleistocene period. Then after the geological periods it gives a little background on physical geology. There is alot of colorful pictures and illustrations to guide you along with the text. This is a very interesting book that I recommend if you are interested in this type of reading. Another hit for the Discovery Channel!
Rating: 
Summary: good intro on prehistoric life
Review: I found this book delightful. While not as hard hitting or as "meaty" as Fortey's Life or the recent Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs, it does provide a nice overview in coffee-table-book-format of life on earth. I liked how it presented the fauna and flora for each geologic period, illustrating a particular environment for a given location in that time period, such as the Ghost Ranch fauna in Triassic New Mexico or the Vendian fauna from Precambrian Australia. I particularly liked the Riversleigh marsupial fauna and the Eocene Messel fauna (and flora too) of Germany. There are many nice maps of the Earth throughout its history showing the appearence and disappearance of the continents, tracing the rise and fall of Pangea, Gondwanaland, and Laurasia. The book has several appendices about a number of subjects, such as volcanoes, plate tectonics, fossil formation, sedminentation, and biographies of major paleonotologists. They are rather basic, but help make this a great book for those new to prehistoric life and would make this an excellent text for middle school or high school students.
Rating:
Summary: good intro on prehistoric life
Review: I found this book delightful. While not as hard hitting or as "meaty" as Fortey's Life or the recent Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs, it does provide a nice overview in coffee-table-book-format of life on earth. I liked how it presented the fauna and flora for each geologic period, illustrating a particular environment for a given location in that time period, such as the Ghost Ranch fauna in Triassic New Mexico or the Vendian fauna from Precambrian Australia. I particularly liked the Riversleigh marsupial fauna and the Eocene Messel fauna (and flora too) of Germany. There are many nice maps of the Earth throughout its history showing the appearence and disappearance of the continents, tracing the rise and fall of Pangea, Gondwanaland, and Laurasia. The book has several appendices about a number of subjects, such as volcanoes, plate tectonics, fossil formation, sedminentation, and biographies of major paleonotologists. They are rather basic, but help make this a great book for those new to prehistoric life and would make this an excellent text for middle school or high school students.
Rating:
Summary: Quite good, but...
Review: I had my doubts about this book when I received it. It seemed to
be a child's book. However, reading it my first impression quicly went away. Its colourfulness makes it a good, amusing reading; the good paleo-art is combined with good scientific standards, and I learned a lot from it.
There are two things that I would like to suggest for a later edition:
1 ) I would like to see some taxonomic trees. That would help me to understand a few things that weren't clear from reading the book. For instance, did the synapsids evolve from reptiles, or were they never reptiles, and evolved directly from aphibian ancestry? Perhaps some explanation on the cladistics studies that have been made is in order.
I think the taxonomic trees would make relationships between the different families and animals clearer. And I would appreciate trees not centered on mammals, but showing these on par with all the other big divisions that evolved from the amphibians, like the lizards, birds, turtles, etc (some of which we group under that ill-defined label of "Reptiles").
2 ) My other complaint has to do with precisely this human self-centrism: did the fish stoped evolving after the Devonian? I understand that the book needs some sort of direction, but I think the formula "first microbes" -> "us " (which this book has to some point evaded) is a tired one, and forgets too many branches, and perhaps the most important, of life's evolution. For instance, I would like to see a few pages on the evolution of plants, which had a major influence on the evolution of animals (where would we be without that great invention, the tree?).
But I agree that space in this book is limited, and its intended readership wide, so given that, I think a good compromise was reached, with the exception of the taxonomic trees.
Rating:
Summary: A coffee-table book for dinosaur geeks
Review: It is a little-known fact that most of the dinosaurs in the film "Jurassic Park" are actually from the Cretaceous period, millions of years later. That is one thing I learned from the ''Atlas of the Prehistoric World,'' a coffe-table book from The Discovery Channel's publishing imprint. The highlights of the book, of course, are the lavish illustrations, which chart the movement of the world's contients from before the forming of the Pangean supercontinent to modern times -- and which always show you where things were in relation to where they are today. It's a little awe-inspiring to realize just how much change the world has undergone in just the last 620 million years. A bit less impressive, unfortunately, are the sections later on that explain what forms of life were around at what periods of time. Author Douglas Palmer's text probably is as detailed as that you'll find in any other coffee-table volume, but that isn't saying much. Books like this always excel at pictures and disappoint with the explanatory text. In this case, the text reads like something intended for intelligent junior-high students, which may not be a bad thing if you are one or are buying this book for one. Anyway, if prehistoric times interest you, you'll probably find, as do I, that the illustrations' merits outweigh the text's faults.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent informative reference
Review: This book has it all: the physical history of the earth as the continents moved about the planet and the evolution of life (the rise and fall of all sorts of species of animals). It's up to date and has copious (and beautiful) illustrations and diagrams. Geology and palentology buffs will enjoy owning it.
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