When it comes to dinosaurs, there are few who can match the enthusiasm for the subject than that possessed by children with a particular interest in them. To be sure, paleontologists know their field of study, but for sheer exuberance-driven knowledge, your dino-obsesed ten-year-old is a perpetually bubbling font of information like few others. Not that it should surprise anyone, but I myself was just such a ten-year-old. And had I, back in those early years, been presented with a copy of The Sauropod Dinosaurs; Life in the Age of Giants by Mark Hallett and Mathew J. Wedel, I doubt that my nose would have come out of it until every last detail contained therein had been well fixed in my memory.
Not that it is a book written for children, mind you (although to be fair, outside of scholarly papers, most any book on the subject of dinosaurs is fodder for the intellect of the young dinosaur enthusiast); but rather it is – as an initial thumb-through quickly showed me shortly after its arrival – a comprehensive and richly illustrated overview, written for the general but motivated reader, of the present state of knowledge about the sauropods, a group that contains some of the most iconic and popularly known dinosaurs.
While my ability to fix the names, facts, and figures of dinosaurs into my memory is not quite as keen as it was as a boy, I do still expect to find my nose stuck into this book for extended periods of time in the very near future.
