The Dover publishing company is best known, perhaps, for its low-cost reprints of older books. But it turns out some nice original stuff, too, including coloring books that have more to them than most coloring books. One of the favorites around here is the Prehistoric Mammals Coloring Book by Jan Sovak. It shows over 40 species, from rodent to whale, gopher to woolly mammoth, saber-tooth to Irish elk. Animals are shown in habitats, doing things. Admittedly there are more bared fangs and life-and-death battles than in your general coloring book, but it's not gory. Interspersed with pictures of friendly animal family tableaus and vegetarians chomping on leaves, there are some pictures with obvious peril, but in most cases the animal under attack still has a chance, let's put it that way. As a bonus, there are full-color renditions of 13 of the pictures on the covers, inside and out.
As it happens, we're in the same general part of the country as the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which is best known for its mammal fossils, so that undoubtedly plays into local popularity. But it's a good coloring book for kids who are curious about the prehistoric world, and who are up to captions like this: "Probably the largest flesh-eating mammal that ever lived was the
Megistotherium. Approximately twice as large as a polar bear and weighing about 2,200 pounds, it could easily prey upon very large animals, such as the early mastodonts illustrated here (on mastodonts, see page 22). Fossils of
Megistotherium have been discovered in North Africa, where it lived about 30 million years ago." (The picture shows a creature like a big cat snarling from a ledge at some elephant-like creatures below him, across a river.)
Prehistoric Mammals Coloring Book
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