Product Description

A pair of fierce but beautiful eyes look out from the undergrowth of conifers.  She is an intelligent killer...

So begins one of the most extraordinary novels you will ever read.  The time is 120 million years ago, the place is the plains of prehistoric Utah, and the eyes belong to an unforgettable heroine.  Her name is Raptor Red, and she is a female Raptor dinosaur.

Painting a rich and colorful picture of a lush prehistoric world, leading paleontologist Robert T. Bakker tells his story from within Raptor Red's extraordinary mind, dramatizing his revolutionary theories in this exciting tale.  From a tragic loss to the fierce struggle for survival to a daring migration to the Pacific Ocean to escape a deadly new predator, Raptor Red combines fact an fiction to capture for the first time the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of the most magnificent, enigmatic creatures ever to walk the face of the earth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #249099 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-01
• Released on: 1996-08-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 6.89" h x .75" w x 4.17" l, .31 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Narrated from the point of view of a dinosaur, paleontologist Bakker's novel is filled with facts and informed speculations regarding dinosaur life.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The dinosaur known as "raptor" first became well known through Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (Knopf, 1990). Revolutionary paleontologist Bakker (The Dinosaur Heresies, LJ 11/1/86), who consulted on the special effects for the film adaptation, has written a novel that might be subtitled "A Year in the Life of a Dinosaur," as he tells the story of Raptor Red, a giant carnivore of the Early Cretaceous period. Having lost her mate in a botched hunting attack, Red (so-named because of the red stripe on her snout distinguishing her from other raptor species) joins forces with her sister and her sister's three chicks to survive in a world of hostile natural forces. Bakker manages to mix scientific theories?some of which are definitely on the cutting edge?with a rip-roaring narrative. Perhaps even more miraculously, he has created a sympathetic nonhuman heroine without anthropomorphizing her into a Disney character. This astonishing and successful novel will appeal to a wide audience and belongs in all fiction collections.
-?Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Conn.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Introducing his superb animal biographical "novel," Bakker reveals that the "velociraptors" in the movie Jurassic Park were of just speculative provenance. No bones for raptors that big had been found. Then, during filming, they were. Bakker, once paleontology's bad boy for insistently advocating such heresies as that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, imagines a year in the life of such a dinosaur, a young adult female he dubs, on account of her distinctive species markings, Raptor Red. She has come to Utah over the land bridge from Asia in a pack including her sister and the sister's two chicks. Her year is action filled, featuring an on-and-off-and-on relationship with an eligible male, conflicts with the impulsive sister, the oversight of an old dactyl (i.e., winged dinosaur) who is symbiotic with her pack, and vivid encounters with prey and rival carnivores that Bakker loads with biological and evolutionary information. Analogizing the raptors to modern wolves and eagles, Bakker attributes considerable cognition and emotion to them, which makes his book all the more exciting and provocative. Good reading for animal lovers from 10 to 100. Ray Olson