Walking with Prehistoric Beasts

Rating:
Summary: Get to know ancient beasts!
Review: A diverse audience from young children to adults will be enthralled with this companion to the television series produced by the BBC and follow-up to Walking with Dinosaurs (DK, 2000). The evolution of life on earth since the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction is illustrated as readers might view this world on a safari. The sequence begins forty-nine million years ago and in six episodes progresses to a year in the life of a mammoth 30,000 years ago. The adventure presents familiar sabre-toothed tigers, mammoths, and primates, as well as the less well-known early whales and hyaenodons. The narrative for each group of animals focuses on a fictional vignette that presents scientific knowledge with captivating creativity. One narrative depicts early horses of the Eocene forest, whereas another highlights the fighting entelodonts. Major fossil finds, analysis of fossil evidence, geological processes, and time lines are interspersed in sidebars for in-depth science. More careful editing of time lines would have corrected a misplaced divergence of apes and hominids as twenty-million years ago rather than four-million years ago, as correctly stated in the text. The colored illustrations are awesome, the stories captivating, and the information comprehensive. A younger or only mildly interested student will probably enjoy the illustrations and narratives but skip the more technical sidebars. This one is a must-buy for any library.

Rating:
Summary: Even better than Walking With Dinosaurs
Review: As a writer who specializes in novels about prehistoric life forms continuing to exist into the present, this book is an invaluable reference. For anybody interested in prehistoric life, this beautiful book presents artistic and extremely life-like images of the extinct fauna that came to populate the planet following the dinosaurs. So much so, that you will believe you are seeing them in the flesh.

I was especially pleased by the terror birds and the evolution of the prehistoric whales.

Rating:
Summary: Carnivorous ground-sloth?!
Review: I bought two copies of this book: one for myself and one for a 12-year-old relative. The illustrations are superb, the information secure and grounded on the latest paleontological finds, the narrative intersting...in short, one fine example of BBC expertise in documentary-making. However, there's something that has, I'm afraid, gone astray in Chapter 5, where the author, in order to arrange for a confrontation between a pride of saber-tooth tigers and a giant ground sloth, comes with the idea that ground-sloths scavenged carcasses from predators "to supplement their diet". Now, where did this come from? I've never heard the slightest hint of evidence about that, and I found this particular piece of informed guess-work somewhat aberrant, to say the least. Seems like something atuned to the necessities of more dramatic story-telling of a kind of Pleistocene telenovela - perhaps because ground-sloths lived in what today is Argentina? Outside from this (admittedly small)slip, however, the book deserves to be bought, kept and cherished, from one generation to another.

Rating:
Summary: Even better than "Dinosaurs"; Tells of little-known mammals
Review: I have always thought prehistoric mammals and birds got the shaft when compared to dinosaurs, but I have also thought they were every bit as fascinating. I never thought I would see these creatures brought to print and screen as they are portrayed in this book and the accompanying television program. If you were a fan of "Walking with Dinosaurs" (and you should be), you will enjoy this as well. I learned a great deal that I did not previously know, even though I consider myself fairly well-read on the subject. It is a story that has been crying out for years to be told: What happened AFTER the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, in the intervening 64 million + years. The book starts out at 49 million years ago, after the earth had recovered from the asteriod KT event, and ends only a few thousand years ago.

Rating:
Summary: Even better than "Dinosaurs"; Tells of little-known mammals
Review: I have always thought prehistoric mammals and birds got the shaft when compared to dinosaurs, but I have also thought they were every bit as fascinating. I never thought I would see these creatures brought to print and screen as they are portrayed in this book and the accompanying television program. If you were a fan of "Walking with Dinosaurs" (and you should be), you will enjoy this as well. I learned a great deal that I did not previously know, even though I consider myself fairly well-read on the subject. It is a story that has been crying out for years to be told: What happened AFTER the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, in the intervening 64 million + years. The book starts out at 49 million years ago, after the earth had recovered from the asteriod KT event, and ends only a few thousand years ago.

Rating:
Summary: wow!
Review: I saw the documentary and now I saw the book! Oh my God! This vlume sets new standards for book design/layout, fantastic computer illustrations, photographs etc... Sure some of the information concerning these beasts is guesswork but not much. Remember, many experts within the field of paleobiology have put in their `2 cents worth`and they know what they are talking about. As a fisheries biologist, i enjoyed the idea of a book that deals with the life histories of these animals on a day by day basis. Book of the year!!

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating walk through time
Review: This book picks up where "Walking With Dinosaurs" left off, shortly after the meteorite hit Chixulub near the Yucatan and set off the cataclysmic environmental changes that wiped out most of the species then populating our planet, including all of the dinosaurs. The mammals were hit hard but rebounded with a vengeance, and by the time this book opens, after the dust had died down and the planet was again habitable, they had become the dominant life form on earth. The book takes us through several geological periods, introducing us to various species which became dominant and then extinct in their turn, up through the last great ice age in which some extinct life forms, notably the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, interacted with a relative newcomer on the planet named homo sapiens. Haines also shows how homo sapiens descended from australopithecus, the first recognizable humanid, and how many of the social traits of the first humans were handed down through the generations to the present time. Somehow, prehistoric mammals have never generated the same kind of awe that dinosaurs have, maybe because they remind us of animals we are already familiar with, but they provide a fascinating glimpse of how life evolved down through the millenia, and just because many of them looked vaguely like animals currently on our planet, and some of them were actually contemporaneous with human beings, we can imagine what life might have been like had they hung around for a few more epochs. Imagine seeing a giant Indricothere (who looked something like a cross between an overweight giraffe and an elephant) ambling down your street; or witnessing a run-in between a sabre-tooth cat and a giant sloth (sloth wins every time), or chasing a stray mammoth out of your yard. At the end of the book we realize that Haines' greatest achievement is in showing us that extinction has been the fate of most of the species on earth since life first began; and that we are, after all, just another species of mammal, and therefore subject to -- perhaps destined to -- extinction in our own turn.

Rating:
Summary: 4 stars for the illustrations
Review: Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, like Walking with Dinosaurs, is a well illustrated written companion to a BBC documentary on fossil animals and their environment. In this case the age of early mammals is the subject of the discourse. As the author himself points out, before the discovery of dinosaurs, the remains of the early megafauna of the ice ages were the great attractions in 19th Century museums and exhibits. These were the dream-team animals that inspired little boys to go into careers hunting fossils throughout the world. The beautiful CGI of the book does more to bring these animals alive than any other collection of images that I've seen, and it makes one appreciate the advances that have been made in this type of characterization.

While I enjoyed the wildlife presented, as with Walking with Dinosaurs, it is not always made clear to the reader that only some things can be known absolutely about these now extinct animals. Much must be extrapolated from what is known of modern descendants and shear guesswork. Not everyone who reads the book will realize that, and I think that more of an effort should have been made to explain why the authorities on the subject believe what they do about the period. For one thing it would have provided a better learning experience and a greater appreciation for the inspired detective work done by paleontologists world wide.

Worth 4 stars for the illustrations alone!

Rating:
Summary: 4 stars for the illustrations
Review: Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, like Walking with Dinosaurs, is a well illustrated written companion to a BBC documentary on fossil animals and their environment. In this case the age of early mammals is the subject of the discourse. As the author himself points out, before the discovery of dinosaurs, the remains of the early megafauna of the ice ages were the great attractions in 19th Century museums and exhibits. These were the dream-team animals that inspired little boys to go into careers hunting fossils throughout the world. The beautiful CGI of the book does more to bring these animals alive than any other collection of images that I've seen, and it makes one appreciate the advances that have been made in this type of characterization.

While I enjoyed the wildlife presented, as with Walking with Dinosaurs, it is not always made clear to the reader that only some things can be known absolutely about these now extinct animals. Much must be extrapolated from what is known of modern descendants and shear guesswork. Not everyone who reads the book will realize that, and I think that more of an effort should have been made to explain why the authorities on the subject believe what they do about the period. For one thing it would have provided a better learning experience and a greater appreciation for the inspired detective work done by paleontologists world wide.

Worth 4 stars for the illustrations alone!

Rating:
Summary: Yikes!
Review: While I don't even believe in the extreme time periods discussed in this book, I found the pictures fascinating. This is the first time some of these animals have been visualized. These may be ancestors of modern mammals, however I don't believe they lived millions of years ago.

What you will find is pictures of the most amazing and scary creatures you have yet to see. You would not, I repeat, would not want to meet a Basilosaurus. I mean, if you think Animal Planet is interesting, you really might enjoy this book.

Cryptozoology which means "hidden wildlife" is a feature. There are some animals that are still hidden and are not really extinct.

The Sabre-tooth World was quite wild. There are great pictures and comparisons to today's more tame felines. While today's domestic cats kill prey smaller than themselves, the long sabre teeth were used to kill much larger prey.

A creative and fascinating explanation.