"Dinosaurs of the Alberta Badlands" by Dr. W. Scott Persons IV

Publisher:Harbour Publishing, 2018
Edition:First edition
ISBN: 9781550178210
Pages: 144
Includes glossary, index

This book is a great introduction to the world of palaeontology for students, as well as their parents. Dr. Persons spent a great deal of time crafting the text to make it enjoyable to read, and I believe it will delight anybody who picks it up.

The book covers a wealth of topics in an easy to read format, with lots of illustrations (by Dr. Julius Csotonyi) and photographs which help to explain the various topics and concepts. Some of the topics covered include why Alberta is such a perfect place for palaeontology, how fossils are found, how the age of the fossils is determined, how evolution works, how fossils are safely extracted and prepared, and much more.

Interspersed throughout the book he also gives brief biographies of some of the palaeontologists that have worked with him in the Badlands and other parts of Alberta such as Drs. Philip Currie, Angelica Torices, Victoria Arbour, Eric Snively, Michael Burns, and Ryan McKellar. Readers also get to read about various dig sites and find out what is so special about them. Another section examines the various dinosaur species that were common, and are typically found in the Badlands, and other parts of Alberta.

This isn't a large book, but it would be a valuable one for any school library to have in their collection as todays elementary and junior high students are tomorrow's palaeontologists. The final section of the book details what a current students needs to know, and what's they'll need to specialize in if they want to be a palaeontologist.

"52 Things You Should Know About Palaeontology" edited by Alex Callum & Allard W. Martinius

Publisher:[Mahone Bay] Nova Scotia : Agile Libre, 2015.
ISBN: 9780987959447
Characteristics: 137 pages :,illustrations, map ;,23 cm.
Additional Contributors:Martinius, Allard W. 1963-
Cullum, Alex 1969-

When I first came across this title*, I was doing some research for a book on palaeontology, it's historical roots and interaction with anthropology. It looked interesting, and based solely on the title I assumed it was a book directed towards young people (which my research was sorely lacking at the time). When I finally got my hands on a copy I was both a little sad that this wasn't what it was about, but also very much happier when I read the table of contents and found out that this was a compilation of 52 short papers by leading palaeontologists and others in the field from around the world describing their work.

This book gives the reader a basic introduction to the basic science of palaeontology, it's history, and many other related topics. Each of the papers is two pages long, and should whet your appetite to look into the subject areas in more detail.

The various papers in this book touch on the fundamentals of palaeontology, its biology, applying what is learned, teaching the science, stratigraphy, methodology, fossils, and culture with a given paper typically talking about more than one of these subject areas and showing how they all interrelate.

As someone who works in the field and gives tours to school groups and other visitors to our lab (University of Alberta) I believe this book would be quite a valuable resource to any high school library, public library, college or university as it is very complete.

The authors have also published a follow-up to this book entitled "52 More things You Should Know About Palaeontology" which I have yet to read, but will be doing so shortly.

*  Kudos to the editors by the way for spelling palaeontology correctly - this is one of my nit-picky complaints as the people who work with me can attest to.