My education began in a one room school in rural western New York. A lonely, curious childhood led me to love reading, and to explore woods, fields, and creeks. After high school I had no expectations of college, but serendipity led me to earn science degrees from Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts. Soon serendipity struck again: I was hired for a rookie editing/writing job at a children's science magazine. Lucky me, my curiosity about "how" and "why" questions led to being an award-winning author of 125 books, some for adults, nearly all children's nonfiction—about history, environmental problems, ecology, lives of scientists, and many creatures—including some that fascinated me as a kid.
Author Daniel Loxton's words are delightfully illustrated.
I loved that the clearly written text is made more appealing by being broken up in mini-chapters, with titles that get to the heart of explaining evolution. For example, How Change Happens; Big Changes = New Species; How Do We Know That Evolution Happens?; Can We Ever See Evolution Happening?
Evolution is the process that created the terrible teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex and the complex human brain, clever enough to understand the workings of nature. Young readers will learn how a British naturalist named Charles Darwin studied nature and developed his now-famous concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest. And how modern-day science has added to our understanding of the theory of evolution. Can something as complex and wondrous as the natural world be explained by a simple theory? The answer is yes, and now Evolution explains how in a way that makes it easy to understand.
This book is full of adventure but set in constantly shifting visits to other continents and other periods of history.
It includes plenty of discussion of animal life and foreign peoples or historical heroes. We read about twenty of these books, whose illustrations, esp the
more recent ones in color, enlivened the story for a boy who cannot yet read but is
powerfully engaged in good stories.
These books plant interests in history, travel, the environment, and other kids trying new things.
Eight-year-old Jack and his little sister, Annie, are playing in the woods during their summer holiday, when they find a mysterious tree house full of books. But these are no ordinary books . . . And this is no ordinary tree house . . .
Jack and Annie get more than they had bargined for when Jack opens a book about dinosaurs and wishes he could see them for real. They end up in prehistoric times with Pteranodons, Triceratops and a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex! How will they get home again? The race is on . . . !
I have read SF, starting with the classic Jules Verne, since I was a young teenager. Soon I discovered Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Zelazny, Dick, all of whom lit up my mind with wondrous and sometimes dangerous visions of possible futures. During the COVID shutdown period, when our university went to online instruction, my wife convinced me to try my hand at writing in my favorite genre. Previously I had written a textbook, How Films Tell Stories (listed here at Shepherd), but never any fiction, so I wrote Temporal Gambit, a time-travel adventure combined with themes of first contact, artificial intelligence, and alternate history. I then followed it with a sequel. I hope you enjoy.
Bradbury remains my favorite author of all time, and this collection of short stories contains some of his best work, including my favorite time travel tale, “A Sound of Thunder.”
Imagine an avid hunter given the opportunity to stalk the king of prehistoric beasts, the monstrous T-Rex. Then imagine that things don’t go exactly as planned. The world will never be the same.
I am a children’s book author that writes fun, colorful, imaginative books that help children develop a love of stories. My passion for books started at a young age, as one of my favorite things to do was visit the local library with my mom. I have had a lifelong passion for writing and began writing poetry books at nine years old for my school library. I started writing and publishing children’s picture books professionally and founded my publishing company, Lucky Four Press, LLC, in 2019. I hope you enjoy these dino-tastic books I recommended!
Mr. Jay is a wonderful author and master of rhyme.
In this story, Anda, the T-Rex is convinced she is hexed, why else would she have such bad luck? With the help of a friend, and a positive attitude, she soon learns that anyone can make the best of a situation. The colorful illustrations and fun rhymes help bring the story to life.
For Anda, the T-Rex, nothing is going right! After a simply awful day, she's convinced that a horrible hex has given her the worst luck ever! But she soon discovers that bad luck is simply a matter of how you look at things.
A fun day of playing the jungle goes terribly wrong after Anda trips and falls over a tree trunk. That's followed by a long lone at the ice cream parlor, where they run out of her favorite flavor! Then, as if all of that wasn't bad enough, it starts to rain! There can only be one explanation:…
I am an illustrator and author and fantasy stories are some of my favorites. I love getting lost in a book. It might be a cliche, but the ability of a book to take you to a place you’ve never been, or might not even exist, is an amazing power. These are the types of stories I love to create and these books have been a great influence on my own work.
This one is a completely wordless story that transports you back to the time when dinosaurs roamed the planet. It follows a pack of deinonychus who steal the eggs of a tyrannosaurus and a hunt ensues. Through lively drawings and colors that pop, you get to know the personalities of all these different dinosaurs and feel the difficult and often vicious life back then. It’s out of print, but if you can find a copy it’s worth it. There are a few more books in this series that are also great, but this was my first and I cherish my copy.
Thundering herds of lizards roam Cretaceous America, and the earth trembles with their passage. Enormous yet graceful meat-eaters shred the still-living meat from the bones of placid plant-eating saurians. Tyrannosaurus rex, the most fearsome carnivore that ever lived, is king. But even T-rex isn't safe from the greedy eyes and the ravenous appetites of a band of bird-quick Deinonychus. A tale from an age before humans and language, Age of Reptiles: Tribal Warfare is a 128-page epic told entirely in pictures. Ricardo Delgado, production artist for "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," has crafted the finest graphic novel about dinosaurs ever…
I’ve been mad about dinosaurs and ancient life since I was seven. I have been amazingly lucky to be able to develop a career as a professional palaeontologist and to be able to research and talk about the subject. We were first to show the original colours of dinosaur feathers, and this discovery provides a perfect way to open the discussion about how palaeontologists know what they say they know. In my books, I seek to amaze, amuse and inform. I have written many books, including pop science, textbooks, technical-scientific works, and books for children, and every year brings new discoveries to be transmitted to the world.
The best seller of all time, a lively romp through dinosaur research (and researchers).
This is for all readers, and you’ll be hooked by the lively, pacy text by Steve, as he hurtles from continent to continent, digging up bones from China to Poland, working on Tyrannosaurus rex and other great beasts in the basements of the world’s museums, and sharing with readers what it’s like to be a working paleontologist.
For aspiring young bone-diggers, this is an inspiration, although it’s not like this all the time: paleontologists also sometimes have to mark student essays and fight with university systems to get their field trip costs refunded!
The Times Science Book of the Year. A Sunday Times Bestseller.
66 million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, Dr. Steve Brusatte, one of the leading scientists of a new generation of dinosaur hunters, armed with cutting edge technology, is piecing together the complete story of how the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years.
The world of the dinosaurs has fascinated on book and screen for decades - from early science fiction classics like The Lost World, to Godzilla terrorizing the streets of Tokyo, and the monsters of Jurassic Park. But…
I write about those people (geologists, art historians, historians, and curators), places (museums, universities, and societies), and things (fossils, paintings, and historical artifacts) that shape our understanding of the world. I am not so much interested in the history of ideas as in the very nature of art, geology, history, and the museum. And like my recommended authors, the approach I take to my subjects is, I hope, always rather novel. In The Great Fossil Enigma, for example, I felt that the tiny, suggestive, but ultimately ambiguous, nature of the fossils permitted me to see into the scientific mind. This tends to be where extinct animals live after their demise.
Fiffer describes himself as a lawyer, journalist, and author. For the story he tells, these turn out to be perfect qualifications because he is not so much interested in telling the reader about the animal as in the scandal and intrigue that surrounded the discovery of this now-famous museum specimen. A fast-paced tale of unexpected twists and turns, when the FBI appears you start to wonder if you haven’t slipped into the pages of a David Baldacci thriller. It's a great true story and one likely to raise your eyebrows.
In 1990, the skeleton of a battle-scarred Tyrannosaurus rex matriarch was found, virtually complete, in what many call the most spectacular dinosaur fossil discovery to date. Not just another dinosaur book, Tyrannosaurus Sue is a fascinating introduction to the centuries-old history of commercial fossil hunting, a legal thriller and a provocative look at academic versus commercial science and the chase for the money that fuels both. - Steve Fiffer, an attorney who has followed the story for the past seven years, has captured the whole range of characters and issues embroiled in the fight for Sue. Fiffer communicates both the…
Liu
is the author of one of my favourite recent works of science fiction, a trilogy
called The Three-Body Problem, so
deciding to read Of
Ants and Dinosaurs felt completely natural. He’s
working in a very different mode here, though.
Of Ants and Dinosaurs is a modern fable and tells the story of an
Earth where these two vastly different species achieve sentience, build a
symbiotic civilisation,
and what happens after. It’s a fast read, and you can tell Liu was having fun
in the writing. Full of wonderful ideas and perspective-shifting observations,
this is an oddball science fiction/fantasy.
Try this one if you liked George
Saunders’ Fox 8 or Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
A satirical fable, a political allegory and an ecological warning from the author of The Three-Body Problem.
On an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth's first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus' lunch.
From humble tooth-picking origins, ants and dinosaurs - two species so unalike and yet so complementary - forged an alliance that culminated in an antimatter-powered Age of Wonder.
But such magnificent industry came at a price - a price paid first by Earth's biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it. And yet the dinosaurs…
I never actually stopped reading children’s literature. Even as a grown-up, I figured out a way to read picture books every day. After earning a master’s degree in education, I found myself back in the library reading to students. I love reading funny books; they are more engaging and more likely to get kids reading and keep them reading. I love humor and think it is perfect in the shorter format of picture books.
I love to read this as the school year is beginning. Children can identify with feeling different on the first day of school.
I love how Penelope (the main character who happens to be a T Rex) is blithely oblivious to the impact she has on the students around her. The tables are turned when she crosses paths with a hungry goldfish.
It's the first day of school for Penelope Rex, and she can't wait to meet her classmates. But it's hard to make human friends when they're so darn delicious! That is, until Penelope gets a taste of her own medicine and finds she may not be at the top of the food chain after all. . . . Readers will gobble up this hilarious new story from award-winning author-illustrator Ryan T. Higgins.
