Arnold, C. 2004 (illustrations by L. Caple). Pterosaurs. Rulers of the skies in the dinosaur age. – New York, Clarion Books

Abstract

Children love dinosaurs and not surprisingly, with the increased interest in these prehistoric animals since Spielberg’s films Jurassic Park and BBC’s ‘Walking with dinosaurs’, yearly many children books appear (few have been reviewed at www.PalArch.nl, see the archive in the Centre of Book Reviews). But the vast majority focus on dinosaurs and children books on other prehistoric animals are rare. Caroline Arnold’s ‘Pterosaurs. Rulers of the skies in the dinosaur age’ is such an exception. Caroline Arnold has written many books for children (also on other non-dinosaur prehistoric animals such as Megalodon, the giant shark), which becomes immediately clear once you start reading,

The book has 40 pages and large font, making reading easy. The chapters are short and try to include the necessary information in which Arnold succeeds well. The artwork is fabulous and clearly visualises for the young readers (aimed at children in the age of 8-12) how these strange animals looked like. This is especially important because there are no comparable animals living nowadays. These first flying vertebrates were unique in many respects. It is thus important to explain the body of pterosaurs, which is done in a chapter after the chapters giving general information on taxonomy, names and ages, and before the chapters with more specific information on variety, what they ate etc. Read more...