The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

Ce livre est un super ouvrage pour tout ceux qui souhaitent en apprendre plus sur les différentes espèces de dinosaures. Le livre illustre les squelettes en précisant quelles os ont vraiment été retrouvés ainsi que des études du système musculaire. J'aurai aimé plus de détails sur la partie musculaire mais j'imagine qu'il aurait fallu plus de tomes pour passé sous différents angles tout les specimens en revue.

It is a field guide to dinosaurs! I went to the Denver Museum Nature and Science and photographed dinosaursI had never heard of, then looked them up in the guide. It has great illustrations of Dino skeletons and musculature, info on period they lived in, predator and prey and much more.

This book is a must have, because of the large number of fantastic skeletal drawings Paul is famous for. But there are two drawbacks: first, the relationship between groups and families are really hard to get because it's missing a family tree, so you have to rely on family or group name font size.. the larger, the broader but flipping pages like this is a nightmare. Second, Paul indulges in many kinds of extreme theories, and while some could in fact be true, here we have quite a parade: maniraptorans being secondary flightless? Triceratops juvenile of Torosaurus? Two species of Tyrannosaurus in USA with "Sue" and "Stan" defining them? They're all proposed as facts, while they are debated ideas at best.

A neat book for your average person. I bought it for a young, aspiring paleontologist and spent a little time flipping through it. Both of us enjoy reading it.

Great book but I cannot give this 5 stars due to a gaping and frustrating omission.Will not be readily accessible to your average dino enthusiast, but for those who wish to dig deeper into the science of these fascinating creatures, this is one of the essential books. Other reviews will tell you of the quality of the illustrations, especially the skeletal views, and the taxonomic lumping employed throughout. I want to comment on what is a glaring omission: the lack of a cladogram illustrating the taxonomy applied in the ‘Group and Species Accounts’ section - which forms the bulk of the book. I found Paul’s classifications odd (virtually all Theropods are ‘Avepods’? look that up and see how little is available on the web) and without a cladogram to visualize his overall scheme, I found myself without context in reviewing a particular species or subgroup. I actually had to extract my own cladogram from his never-explicitly-defined use of font/highlighting/case to designate groups and subgroups. WHY is no cladogram provided??? If he’s going to use an unfamiliar taxonomy and nomenclature, he needs to explain it. The only thing that comes close to this is the excellent timeline of major groups (which strangely is not referenced in the TOC nor given a title(?)). But even this diagram requires too much work to understand and could have been easily clarified. It applies an implicit taxonomy by the convention of positioning more derived groups to the right (as they appear later in time) of more basal, ancestral groups. However, this convention is not rigorously applied – titanosauriforms are shown directly to the right (as if derived from) baso-ornithischians!These issues are perhaps more the responsibility of the editor than the author, but extremely frustrating nonetheless.Note to those interested: I am an amateur paleontologist more focused on invertebrates.