Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1102281 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

Well-written and excellently illustrated
Dinosuars/Big Sky is well written and excellently illustrated. It provides a basic history of bone hunting in Montana and a "how-to" of conducting field research. It also discusses the various geologic formations of the Mesozoic in Montana. All of this is illustrated with appropriate graphics and period and contemporary photos. As is the case with most well-written dino books of the past decade, Horner also discusses the paleo-environmental information that the geologic data provide - how paleontologists know in what setting the various dinos lived. An appendix clarifies some of the sometimes confusing anatomical terms that are used when discussing dino skeletons.
Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, at 60 pages the longest, discuss where Montana's Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous geologic formations are found and the dinos that have been found in them. It is arguable that the info on the geologic formations could have been better placed with the dinos rather than separately.
The only weak part of Dinosaurs/Big Sky lies in a couple of erratic metric to imperial measurement conversions and the pronunciations given with the descriptions of each dinosaur.
Paleontologists are not experts on classical or church Latin pronunciation or the vagaries of classical Greek pronunciation, and most paleontologists end up pronouncing the dinos' names with much inflection from their native languages, but Horner or his editor have not managed to be consistent from one page to the next in this section. Some pronunciations are incorrect by any standard. Richardoestesia gilmorei, for example, twice has its genus name butchered - both wrong.
All in all, this is an excellent introductory to mid-level book for anyone interested in North American dinosaurs and how professionals do field work.

dinosaurs
I LIKED THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT GAVE YOU INFORMATION ABOUT DINOSAURS.

dinosaurs
I LIKED THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT GAVE YOU INFORMATION ABOUT DINOSAURS.