PREHISTORIC LIFE - a book review

Dorling Kindersley’s book of PREHISTORIC LIFE... what can be said about it?

Firstly, it was intended as a book for children – that is evident in wonderful, well-shot (or well-designed) illustrations: some real-life photographs, some – 3-D images, some – drawn in more traditional ways. It is evident in text, which mostly consists of a series of short sentences and/or paragraphs, designed to give maximum of information in minimum of text.

Secondly, despite the above-mentioned intent, what PREHISTORIC LIFE comes across is a multimedia site made paper: the fact boxes contain all sorts of asides that just distract the reader, and the images themselves are different and distributed unevenly: most of 3-D images concern the dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles; the photographs (and other media) concern other parts of the book. 

Thirdly, the fact boxes themselves are uneven. Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus and Euoplocephalus are the most detailed fact boxes (among the dinosaurs): the book’s writers, designers, other members of the staff team spent most of their attention there, showing various details of the skeleton. Fair enough. But the Iguanodon fact box shows only the bones of its front limb – and there is no mention of the fact that Iguanodon and Megalosaurus were the first dinosaurs to have ever been studied by scientists, which is simply wrong and incorrect.

Then we have the intended audience of the book. As it was mentioned before, the media element of PREHISTORIC LIFE aims at children, but the abundance of actual scientific facts, the size and weight of the actual book (with over 500 pages PREHISTORIC LIFE may not be heavier than an average brick, but neither it is lighter), the cost of it make PREHISTORIC LIFE a very hefty and doubtful gift for an average child: in this day and age they would rather look up the dinosaurs, the pterosaurs and the mega-mammals on the Internet rather than shift through the pages – for a lay person of a pre-teen/teen age that is boring and tedious, and an adult will find the text of this book to be rather childish and naive: “Monoplosaurus wasn’t related to Dilophosaurus”, “after Tyrannosaurus Allosaurus is the best-known theropod” – no duh! 

On their own, these factors are surpassable; combined they spell extinction for PREHISTORIC LIFE as a successful encyclopedia and promise more trouble for DK as a company.