Early Book Review: Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew by John Pickrell

Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew by John Pickrell is a new non fiction book that is currently scheduled for release on March 7 2017. From the outback of Australia to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and the savanna of Madagascar, award-winning science writer and dinosaur enthusiast John Pickrell embarks on a world tour of new finds, meeting the fossil hunters working at the frontier of discovery. He reveals the dwarf dinosaurs unearthed by an eccentric Transylvanian baron; an aquatic, crocodile-snouted carnivore bigger than T. Rex, which once lurked in North African waterways; a Chinese dinosaur with wings like a bat; and a Patagonian sauropod so enormous it weighed more than two commercial jet airliners.  Other surprising discoveries hail from Alaska, Siberia, Canada, Burma, and South Africa. Why did dinosaurs grow so huge? How did they spread across the world? Did they all have feathers? What do sauropods have in common with 1950s vacuum cleaners? The stuff of adventure movies and scientific revolutions, Weird Dinosaurs examines the latest breakthroughs and new technologies radically transforming our understanding of the distant past. Pickrell opens a vivid portal to a brand new age of fossil discovery, in which fossil hunters are routinely redefining what we know and how we think about prehistory’s most iconic and fascinating creatures.

Weird Dinosaurs is a well researched and written book for readers that have always loved dinosaurs, or have had their interest revived by other dinosaur lovers in their lives, or the news of new information and discoveries in the field. The. book is written with a nice blend of information and narrative text, giving life to the discoveries and the people involved in uncovering them. I was fascinated by the information, but am a reader that likes my non fiction more simply stated than narrative, I found myself wandering a bit.  However, this was an issue with my personal preference and reading style rather than anything the author did wrong. I really enjoyed discovering about the changing and growing knowledge and concepts that surrounds dinosaurs and our planet's history. The new techniques that the scientists are using, and the discoveries they have made possible are simply amazing. 


Weird Dinosaurs is an informative and entertaining text with a nice blend of narrative and scientific fact. Readers that do not like a little narrative to entertain and dramatize the facts a bit might not enjoy this as much as others. However, the facts and information included are simply fascinating. 

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