AGE OF ANCIENT SEA MONSTERS

An album of portraits of aquatic reptiles of the Mesozoic Era.

This fourth volume in a series that promises to cover much of past and present life on Earth continues to focus on the age of reptiles. The illustrations, paintings based on life-sized models, are accompanied by imagined stories about the creatures as well as facts about their place in reptile history. The creators covered much of the same time period in Secrets of Ancient Sea Monsters (2021) and reuse some of those pictures, but the organization and accompanying information are different. Gone are the fast facts that were found on the bottoms of the pages of earlier volumes; this one has longer and more imaginative stories. Yang gives his subjects emotions, motivations, and even occasional conversations. This volume is roughly organized in a chronological manner over the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. In a final summary of this history, the writer seems to ascribe evolutionary changes to the desires of the different species—though this may be partly an artifact of translation: “The powerful plesiosaurs were confidently replacing the ichthyosaurs as the hegemon of the ocean.” Chen’s translation is reasonably smooth, but words like hegemon, maxilla, and volatile are likely to be as unfamiliar to young readers as the scientific names of the species themselves. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

More science-based imagination for readers with a passion for prehistoric reptiles.