Today’s review covers Dinopedia… no, not that one, or that one. This “Dinopedia” is writtten by Tom Jackson, and features illustrations credited to a group called “Good Wives and Warriors“, and featuring significantly less of Darren Naish than the other two books (that is to say, not at all).
It is not written in a “true” encyclopedia format, and in that sense is more like Ultimate Dinopedia than Darren Naish’s Dinopedia. It presents profiles of various prehistoric beasts in chronological order, with a full page illustration accompanied by a page of text. While it covers a wide swath of Deep Time, it pays much greater attention to the Mesozoic than to other eras. There are only four animals for the entire Paleozoic, and only three for the Cenozoic, while the Mesozoic gets twenty. The Mesozoic section is even subdivided into its three time periods; Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.
I suppose it’s fitting in a way that a book called “Dinopedia” would focus more on dinosaurs and their contemporaries than other creatures, but if they were going to bother with other time periods, I would have appreciated a slightly more robust offering of creatures. Maybe one for each period of the Paleozoic/Cenozoic, at least.
The standard creature profiles are interspersed with pages devoted to broader topics, such as “The Great Dying” or “The Bone Wars”. This gives the book a more well-rounded variety of subjects to discuss than could be achieved with the creature profiles alone.
The illustrators have delivred lightly stylized artwork in bright, almost psychedelic colors. If I were to describe the style, I would say it feels a bit like a mashup of the works of Clémence Dupont and Luis V. Rey, with Dupont’s stylization and Rey’s color sensibilities. Some of the reconstructions seem a little more rigorous than others, but on the whole they look pretty good. I did notice a Postosuchus that seems to have been traced from a photo of the Schleich toy, which I have to take marks off for.
While I like the book overall, it doesn’t quite live up to the expectation set up by the “encyclopedia” moniker. I would have expected a much thicker book with a lot more entries, while the book we got feels somewhat perfunctory. I can’t quite justify a full “Stomp of Approval”, but I do recommend giving it a look if you come across it, for the sake of the interesting art style if nothing else.
Dino Dad Reviews 