Prehistoric World

My wife bought this for my son from Scholastic Book service and then it ended up becoming a bit of an obsession for my son and I. We have spent hours looking up the various creatures and studying fossils. This book is brief, but the illustrations are fantastic and evocative and give a good grounding of the great ages in the evolution of life on earth. The focus is broad an inclusive - from the rise of single celled life through the Burgess Shale, Cambrian, Silurian seas, fishes, advent of life on land, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, mammals - broken out by continents with a nice section on marsupials - and finally a about 1/4 of the book focuses on the rise of humans. There are pages for Austrolopithicines, Homo Habilus, Erectus, Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens, and a mention about rise of animal husbandry and agriculture. The scholarship is pretty up to date and the sins are mostly of omission. The strength is that the illustrations are so beautiful and dynamic (some have narrative elements which captivate kids). Books like this are gateways - they do not have enough content to provide a great education - but that brevity is a strength: they provide just enough to draw kids in. The one mis-step of this book is that it attempts to provide that next step by the so-called "internet-linked" feature. Visiting the usborne-quicklinks web site proved frustrating. The site is poorly laid out and is hampered by a terribly poor search functionality and some content that requires real player (which we choose not to run since it introduces spam IM messages). I found just going to Google far superior. There is GREAT pedogological content on this site - but you have to dig around for it - work better done by a grown up than a child. Other than this quibble this book was definitely worth it. We all had a ball and I learned a lot myself (which was probably a factor in it getting my son so fired up too).