[.ca] Walking With Prehistoric Beasts (ISBN 0789478293)

From Amazon.co.uk:
Walking with Beasts is the eagerly anticipated follow-up to the hugely successful Walking with Dinosaurs and fully deserves to be just as successful. Subtitled A Prehistoric Safari, it takes the reader on a journey through the wildlife parks of the last 65 million years since the demise of the dinosaurs. While everyone has heard of the many different kinds of dinosaurs, how many people have heard of the indricotheres, chalicotheres, dinotheres or even our own ancestors the plesiadapiforms? Hopefully, after the showing of the BBC TV series Walking with Beasts and this superb book from Tim Haines, we might have a better idea about the life and times of our own mammal relatives and ancestors. Designed for the general reader, the story follows a mixture of chronology and environmental themes from the "New Dawn" following the demise of the dinosaurs, when mammals were just beginning to find their feet again, through to "Whale Killer", describing when mammals first took to life in the oceans and evolved awesome top predators such as the 18m Basilosaurus. The strange extinct mammals such as the indricotheres figure in the "Land of the Giants" and our own human story is told, culminating in the Ice Age and the question of our ancestors' hand in extinctions. The computer-generated images produced by Daren Horley's team are absolutely stunning and are, if anything, better than those in Walking with Dinosaurs. The animals look especially convincing in the still photos, which appear on every page. The pictures are so good that it will be hard to convince younger children that they are not real. Walking with Beasts should be on everyone's shopping list. --Douglas Palmer

wow!:
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!!

Get to know ancient beasts!:
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.

Even better than "Dinosaurs"; Tells of little-known mammals:
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.

Carnivorous ground-sloth?!:
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.

4 stars for the illustrations:
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!