Several months after acquiring the book I leaf through it and wonder how I could have given it such a high rating as I did. It has flaws throughout!
- The book appears to have a drastic shortage of species to list - it is only half as thick as Simon and Schuster's Encyclopedia of Animals - despite the fact that on numerous occasions they list but one or two species from a thirty-species family;
- The art is severely degraded from the above mentioned encyclopedia of animals. While I can see the puzzlement concerning the colors of the creatures' hides, there is no excuse for the the sloppy drawings of several of the animals! If you make a conjecture, please, be sure to follow through! On several of the animals the hair cover fails to obey the laws of physics, and most of the amphibians look like a horrid joke.
- The information is sketchy at best - on numerous occasions special biological mechanisms are mentioned (like a new jaw bone arrangement for the fishes, and the skull structures of the early land animals), yet are never explained in function. Almost all species are captioned with the basics like weight and dimensions followed with senseless filler.
- The between-section class summarizations and the cladistic graphs are also very, very basic. While I understand that the book was not intended for specialists, even the basic layman will find the charts a bit "dumbed down".
This book is flashy and artful, but lacking, lacking a great lot.
