I have the habit of buying anything with geology, paleontology, history, etc. in the title, sometimes without thought to where I'm at with my knowledge base. This was one of those times! The book is a lovely, well illustrated, practical guide to geology for the beginner. Much of what the authors dedicate a single paragraph or page to I have had whole courses in already, so needless to say, I was not quite as enthused over the material as a new comer to the field might be. Certainly for the beginner, especially the Junior High natural science enthusiast, this would be a wonderful gift. It might even make a good text for a high school natual science course, as it covers considerable information on the earth sciences. I plan on giving my copy to a close friend with children interested in these subjects.

Today we were at 12000 feet looking into the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and we decided we needed a book. Any book. A good book. A book that keeps you reading. The Practical Geologist was just the book! We read all night, and the night's not over yet! We learned about geology, and also came a little closer to God. I highly recommend it! p.s. I used to work for Borders.

I use it to introduce students to basic physical geology. It is written at a basic level but the concepts are not oversimplified. The diagrams and text provide just the right amount of information- non- major students are informed but not overwhelmed. The Practical Geologist is a perfect supplement to the historical geology texts, and can serve as an informal and affordably priced lab manual.

Rich with full-color pictures, tables and detailed illustrations, these books are engaging and well thought out. Each page is dominated by photographs with several short text boxes which could encourage reluctant readers to read for recreation or research. Each book is organized into a few broad categories such as "The Living Planet" or "To the Stars and Beyond." These are then divided into subheadings. Each subheading receives two pages, so the information presented on each separate topic is brief. One helpful feature is the use of a "See Also" element at the top of each new topic, which references other pages within the book that the reader might find interesting. Each book also includes print, video and web-based resources for further study, an index, and a glossary of terms. This would make a great addition to a school, home or public library.

From the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow, Neil Clark brings dinosaurs back to life for young and old readers alike. Neil has also written material on dinosaurs for the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Dorling Kindersley Millennium Encyclopedia, as well as two other books on the topic: "A look inside dinosaurs" with Readers Digest and "The Dorling Kindersley Pocket book of dinosaurs". They can be found in most countries in numerous languages.

This review refers to the Hardcover Edition of "The Big Book of Dinosaurs..A Natural History of the Prehistoric World" by Dougal Dixon.....

Like the dinosaurs that this book is about, it is big and beautiful! Dougal Dixon has put together a wonderful history lesson that will take you and your child from the Triassic Period(240-200 mil years ago) to Present Day. The book ranges from the emergance of the Dinosaur to how we know about and study them today.

There are charts and maps realting to the different time periods to refer to, marvelous pictures and chapters relating to the various types. You'll learn about "The Hunters", "The Scavengers","The Fish Eaters","The Sea Reptiles" and "The Flying Reptiles" and of course many more. Recent discoveries that pose a mystery to scientists are among the many interesting facts in this book. Which were the smallest, the brainiest and the best mothers? From Allosaurus to Tyrannosaurus, and the animals that evolved from these magnificent creatures. You'll find out all that in this outstanding book.

It is quite detailed, and I would reccommend it for the older child(probably about 10 and up), who is crazy for dinosaurs. It's a fabulous book just to browse through for adults as well as children(looks great on the coffee table), and would be real uselful for projects and reports.It's a book to be passed down to the grandkids as well, and time will be well spent reading it together.

A book that is both Educational and Cool too!...Enjoy...Laurie

My 6 year old twins loved these challenging dot to dots with stickers and quizzes. Counting up to 350 makes them interesting for children quite a bit older as well.The easiest goes up to about 150. I highly recommend this book.

As a professor and children's writer, I am very impressed by this book. Dougal Dixon manages to cover an immense amount of scientific material in accurate, simple and easily understood terms. The book moves through geological time from the beginning of the earth and the start of life. It gives an over view of life in precambrian, paleozoic, mesozoic and cenozoic times and focuses greater detail in areas such as fossil fish, amphibians, reptiles, etc. Dougal Dixon also gives clear yet indepth explanations of complex subjects such as the mechanisms of evolution. The book is beautifully illustrated with a combination of photographs and art work of various sorts.

There are few books that I routinely give as gifts, but this is one of them. I just love Dougal Dixon's work, and wish every day that The New Dinosaurs: An Alternate Evolution would be put back into print. The imagination of this artist/scientist is off the charts. This book is a field guide to a world that won't exist for 65 million years, when humanity has lost its foothold and has vanished from the face of the Earth. All the animals domesticated by man are gone, as are most of the other fauna we know. The dominant species of this future world, in Dixon's imagining, are evolved from the rats, rabbits, crows, and other pests that humans could never eliminate...and thus they inherate the world when our kind are gone. If you'd like to have a really bad nightmare, imagine being chased through the woods by giant rat-wolves called Falanxes, or stalked by the blind bat-gorillas called Screachers. My favorite is the Vortex, the giant penguin that rules the seas of the future. I love looking through the pages of this book and discovering things I never noticed before. I've given it for birthdays, Christmases, and just-because occasions...it never fails to disappoint. I have a copy of the New Dinosaurs I found on ebay. With any luck this will be available on Amazon one day... it is even better than After Man - and it shows us what dinosaurs would have evolved into today if they had not gone extinct. Please tell as many people as you can about this artist...I think children and adults can really enjoy this brilliant imagination and bizarre menagerie. I am a huge fan.

"After Man" is one of the most engaging, creative books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. While one might think from its outlandish illustrations that it is a book for children, this is simply not the case. That's not to say a ten or eleven year old wouldn't enjoy this book, but there's plenty an adult can take away from it as well.

Beginning with a basic review of the principles of biology and evolution, Dixon proceeds to apply them across a range of environments on an Earth 50 million years removed from mankind. The result is a menagerie of remarkable creatures. Remarkable in that they are frequently unique, even bizarre, but even more remarkable because they represent the result of a familiar creature's evolution. Dixon's world isn't a fantasyland, every creature in it holds true to the principles he so effectively explains in the first chapter. Moreover, they all fill an important ecological niche; he hasn't created 150 pages of carnivores. Rather, he presents a balanced, albeit limited, ecosystem that sheds light on the state of our own environment today.

Beautifully illustrated and highly engaging, "After Man" is a must read for anyone interested in evolution and anthropology. Furthermore, this book is educational without being heavy handed. One by no means needs to be an expert to learn from and enjoy this very unique work.

This book really should be better known. The illustrations are beautiful, for one thing, but the premise behind the book is absolutely fantastic. Dixon dares to conjecture about what future forms life might take on, given a few million more years of evolution. His results are always intriguing, and the reader is left with a strong sense of him-or-her self as being in the MIDDLE of the process of evolution, not at its end. If you are still in school; if you have children; or if, like me, you just hope to have children someday, you ought to just pick thi ( ) up right now. It causes you to look with new eyes at the fauna around you -- pigeons, chipmunks, dogs, birds... what evolutionary forces are acting on them RIGHT NOW? What impact might those forces have, given a few million years to work their magic? Would a new kind of dog develop? Perhaps one with... oh, I don't know, maybe a rainbow-colored dog with wings, suited by evolution for survival due to camoflage ability in urban areas with centuries of accumulated graffiti. And the wings, perhaps developed as a mutation, might let it flee the area more quickly in case of a nuclear attack. (The author mostly deals with pastoral, natural terrain, not post-nuclear-holocause wastelands, for the record). I am kidding about the dog, of course, but these are the sort of things that you will find yourself preoccupied by, after leafing through this beautiful text. Definitely worth it.

This book is a companion book to the television series of the same name. The book itself is lovely, with pictures of the animals and habitats of future Earth with details about behavior and the changing planet.
The only problem is that the book does not go beyond the series. There is no extra information about the future creatures and the only real add on is the small glossary in the back. If you had to pick between this or the series on video or DVD, buy the video or DVD.
With 160 pages I wanted more. It took less time to read the book than watch the television series!

An impressive companion to After Man, another book by Dougal Dixon written on the same genre. However, After Man is less far fetched in its animals than in this book, which are computer generated rather than illustrated. Extremely detailed verbal sketches are accomplice to beautiful graphics of astounding animals of the future. My only complaint is that occasionally there is a bad computer generated image that probably would have done better as an illustration. After Man, Dixon's most masterful book, is best read either immediately before or after reading this one.

After Man was probably the most fun text on evolution I have read. New Dinosaurs was not. The book is based on a fairly simple theme: what would happen if the dinosaurs had not gone extinct and this is a wonderfull concept for a Dougal Dixon book. However, New Dinosaurs did reach it's potential. It is badly illustraited (it seems that dinosaurs, if left to themsleves would evolve into something like how we saw them in the fifties), not particularly informative, and some of the new dinosaurs are completely implausable. It is obvious that Mr. Dixon did not spend the time and effort on New Dinosaurs that he did on After Man.

I have found this book to be fascinating since I first got hold of it as a child. I have always had a fascination with dinosaurs (I'm in college now and majoring in paleontology), so of course I was always plague by the question "What if they hadn't died out?" Dixon answers this question very creatively and to my complete satisfaction. Some of the other reviews on this book claim that many of Dixon's creations are implausible. Well, look around. I see a lot of equally implausible animals roaming the earth today. Have you ever taken a good look at a camel? An anteater? A duckbilled platypus? A porcupine? Think about it. If we hadn't seen them with our own eyes, wouldn't they seem pretty "out there," too? Or some extinct creatures. Anyone with any real knowledge about this subject can tell you that there are some pretty strange creatures represented in the fossil record. To those people who complain about implausibility, all I have to say is this: Go find yourself a nice illustrated book about the Burgess Shale fossils. I recommend "Wonderful Life" by Steven Jay Gould. Spend some time reading up on weird and wonderful critters like Opabinia, Marella, Sidneyia, Aysheaia, Anomalocaris, and Hallucigenia. Then let's hear your views on implausibility.
Dixon has a wonderful imagination, his descriptions are good, he is obviously knowledgeable about the workings of evolution. I find each and every one of his unique critters to be entirely plausible. In fact, every time I read his book, I have this urge to go on some sort of safari to see all those amazing creatures. I will spend the rest of my life regretting that I will never be able to see any of Dixon's wonderful animals except on the pages of his book.

In the tradition of AFTER MAN, this book (which I was lucky enough to discover at a used book shop in San Diego) looks at today- if the dinosaurs had not become extinct. Following evolutionary patterns sometimes not unlike those in AFTER MAN, the book is lavishly illustrated in its depiction of an ecology that has accomodated dinosaur forms in a variety of mammalian, avian and other guises- great for any dinosaur fan, great coffee table book, and one of the most unique dinosaur books I've ever read.

The other reviews on this book are a mixed bunch. While most of Dixon's readers loved his other books - After man and the New Dinosaurs, most agreed that this book was a dissapointment in comparison to the other two. But a few reviewers loved it. I bought it anyway. When I first saw the cover, I didn't know what to expect. The book's start is a sort of review of all of man's ancestors, the same type of introduction in all of Dixon's two other books. Then it breaks into bizzare and implausible entries and drawings of genetically modified monsters that were disigned to repopulate the ravaged earth. The illustrations are often dismissed as "bad". And some are. I could have drawn them, if I wasn't too worried someone else would see them and wonder what twisted thoughts passed unseen through my mind. But many weren't so bad, it was just the content and design. Most were completely ridiculous. And the entries on each species. I don't even want to talk about them, but I have to, since I am writing this review. The entries make no sense. While reading the other reviews, I thought, "Poorly written? Dixon isn't capable of that". But he is. The entries start out at a completely random point. About nothing at all can be discerned about each species. If the author had just written straightfoward entries about each species, instead of random events in each creatures life. "Coffee table book"? Ha! I wouldn't leave this one on a coffee table if my life depended on it.

The funniest part about this book his how serious it pretends to be. Its absurd. The whole thing is just absurd. The pictures are hilariously bad. The story-lines are cliche and ridiculous. This is a fabulous gag gift, and that's about it.

Being a lover of history, Man After Man, really is something I enjoyed. It is about the changing face of mankind and future history, something I enjoy very much. Many people complain that timeline and stories seemed confusing and that the artwork is not that great. First off, I didn't find them at all confusing and the artwork was there to help the reader picture the beings that mankind have become NOT to win any awards or prizes. Don't compare the book to others, just enjoy it. It is NOT a serious piece of work.
I do wish it had been longer and had touched a little more on the changes to the other animals and the plantlife. It would of padded out the book more. I wanted more details!