The Ultimate Dinosaur : Past, Present, and Future

Rating:
Summary: what a value!
Review: big names in science and sf coupled with top paleoartists!

Rating:
Summary: From a dinosaur fan:
Review: I have always been a big dinosaur lover, and in this book, Silverberg, Dobson, and Zimmerman really bring these creatures to life. I loved every page. This is a book for both kids and the paleontologist.

Rating:
Summary: a decent but flawed book
Review: The Ultimate Dinosaur is an ambitious book, one that seeks to alternate sections on the latest theories on the origin, lives, and deaths of dinosaurs as well as pterosaurs and prehistoric marine reptiles, all written by such noted experts as George Olshevsky, Sankar Chatterjee, and others, with dinosaur-themed science fiction short stories by such authors as Charles Sheffield, Gregory Benford, and Harry Turtledove. A great concept.

Unfortunately it was rather unevenly carried out. The non-fiction sections are quite good, though a few are relatively dry to read. I did learn a few things reading these sections, and alone they just about make the book worthwhile. There were some interesting discussions over the relationship of prosauropods and sauropods for instance, and there was a great article on migrating dinosaurs.

However the short stories vary alot in style and quality, some quite good, other more moderately decent, and a few frankly terrible and hard to get through. The short stories and non-fictions are paired together, and it looks like they found it difficult to find a short story to put with some of the non-fiction sections.

Though this may only apply to the hard-cover edition which I have, I feel I must point out the book was either poorly edited, which I find suprising, or poorly published. The book was replete with words that were run together, misplaced punctuation, odd gaps in sentences, and even misspelled words. They were so common at times that it was jarring and irritating. While many books have one or two such errors, there were many of them in this work. Hopefully the paperback version cleared this up.

Having said that though this was still not a bad book and a worthwhile one to get, though frankly I would not place at the top of the list of books to fill your dinosaur needs. Still, wouldn't be bad to have either.