Weekly book shelf 11/5, Prehistoric mammals

 Evolution, by Douglas Palmer, is timeline of the evolution of life on earth. It's mainly a picture book, every two-page spread a beautiful rendering of an era in time, with a timeline stretched across the top of the page, and facts about the living things in short paragraphs at the bottom. The information is really too brief to be anything but interest piquing, but the pictures are very much worth the book, and the information at least helps identify things so you can look them up elsewhere. We love this book.

Top 10 Prehistoric Beasts, by Andrew Goldsmith. A list of the "top 10" prehistoric beasts. This book is extremely unimpressive. Calvin enjoyed that the pictures used seem to have been taken from the Walking with Prehistoric Monsters videos that he loves so much, but other than that it held little interest for him. There was no mention of how the "top 10" beasts were selected, and the information provided was scant, if not incorrect even in some places. Also, I found the flashy colors and multitude of fonts and font sizes to be distracting, or even distressing. Calvin really didn't spend much time on this one.

Woolly Mammoth, by Ron Wilson, is a cute realistic fiction that follows a young mammoth through his first year of life—eating on the plains, migrating south for winter, returning in the spring, and then mating. It's an older book and out of print, but we borrowed it from our library. This is one of those great animal stories that does not personify but showcases natural behavior in an enjoyable way. Calvin read this one over and over again.

Sabertooths and the Ice Age, by Mary Pope Osborne. A Magic Tree House non-fiction companion that I'm sure needs no explanation, no introduction. These books are definitive by any means, but I find them to be great companions to the fiction stories, and Calvin loves them.

Sunset of the Sabertooth, by Mary Pope Osborne. Magic Tree House. Calvin loves it, of course.