Prehistoric Monsters Did the Strangest Things

Step-Up Books

by Leonora Hornblow, Arthur Hornblow

Briefly describes, in chronological order, many of the strange animals that lived on earth between the time life began and the appearance of humans.

Genres: Nonfiction, Childrens, Science, Animals, History

62 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Annamarie]

This book should never be read to a child. This is a fantastic snap-shot in a moment in time depicting our evolving understanding of ancient life, but is so distant from reality that it should not be allowed near impressionable minds. Anthropology/historical reference only.

Michael K. Frith's art is lovely and fun, and clearly strongly inspired by Charles Knight and other early paleo-artists. The writing however is awful. Besides the completely inaccurate biology, these folks had clearly no idea how plate-tectonics worked, to the point that the descriptions of explosions under the earth causing mountains to rise had to be inspired by Disney's Fantasia 1940. The story telling also wanders in tone and topic pretty wildly, though it ends with a PSA to save the whales, so that's something.

[Tanya]

I'm currently listening to Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, and as I was driving along in my car learning about the latest in paleontology, I suddenly flashed back to this book. I owned the whole set of Step-Up books, which introduced me not only to dinosaurs, but to non-fiction in general. I must have read Prehistoric Monsters Did the Strangest Things 20 times from cover to cover. Never mind that it is full of outdated and superseded information (like the whole brontosaurus controversy), I loved learning about dinosaurs from this interesting source.

[Kest Schwartzman]

Much of the text in this book was known to be inaccurate at the time of writing, and the rest has been proved wrong since. But the illustrations- oh, the illustrations are fabulous. Tie-dye T-rex lunges at a magenta hadrosaur. Violet seuss-like trees shade a hot pink swamp. Somehow there is a yellow river with orange waves.

[St-Michel]

Recently unearthed this from an old box of books I had. Basically just a quick and easy children's read of dinosaurs. It's ok, I suppose, but I have far better children's dinosaur books than this. I think the only thing of note is that it shows you how to pronounce the names given. Unfortuantely, there's not very many names in the book and they were all easy names to boot, though I suppose for kids, Rhamphorhynchus or Archaeopteryx would be tough (I know Archaeopteryx was for me when I was a wee one).