Actually the version of Early Man I'm reviewing is the 1968 revised edition. Originally published in 1965 (and apparently the book continued to be revised in 1981), this is a very interesting, albeit very outdated book about prehistoric Man. This book really has some very deep nostalgic value for me as it's been with me since I was a little kid, my parents found a used copy of this book in 1979, and when I got a hold of the book, I absolutely loved the photos in it. One of my favorites have been the front cover which is the skull of a Neandrathal Man, not to mention the picture inside the book of Laugerie Basse in France which is a hanging cliff, and I just dig the buildings under the cliffs, including a restaurant. Laugerie Basse happened to be an area where Cro-Magnon Man inhabited. In this book you get plenty of illustrations of bones, skulls, artifacts, caves, tools, spears made from rocks, and so much more. I give it a very high rating because to this day, I still dig the pictures. Back when I was a kid I was interested in how Man lived in prehistoric time, and this book really satisfied my desire. Of course the book is grossly outdated, but if you don't mind that and curious about prehistoric Man, try this book.

My 12 year old son, who is fascinated by the large cats, saw this book in a bookstore and wanted it. I waited for a year or so before I bought it because it IS college level reading. We thoroughly enjoyed it. There are great drawings of fossil skeletons & extant animal skeletons. Once you have waded past the first 2 chapters and their latin terms are familiar, the rest was terrific. The authors do a fine job of telling the reader what a scholar is looking for in understanding an organism's capabilities and how to see in a living mammal the same capabilities expressed. The bio-mechanics are explained non-mathematically. The extinct species are discussed in terms of their relationship to the probable biosphere in which they lived. The book could use some more graphics to illustrate the "family-tree" of the large cats and where & when they lived in terms of geography, likely environment, & timeline. This material is in the text and in some graphics, but because we all have been sensitized by the great graphics in "National Geographic" & on TV we expect them to be in all books. I am an engineer and found this a fascinating journey into another arena of scholarship, without it being overwhelming.

A wonderful study of the big cats and their numerous fossil relatives, and those fossils which look like cats but turn out to be cases of convergent evolution. A fine study, uniting paleontology with behavioral studies; nicely illustrated with a generous number of drawings and color paintings by Mauricio Anton. This book gives one renewed appreciation for the living large cats, and will send you off to the nearest museum to look up the fossil forms

I never expected the book would be such an impressive accumulation of information and pictures. Everything about this book was done with such detail that nothing I've see so far compares to it. The pictures depict not just the details of each prehistoric cat (and the marsupial convergent evolution 'versions') but presents them in scale to the present and extinct cats to give us an clear idea of the size of these animals. Both author and artist have to do a sequel now that a new sabertooth species was just found in Florida.