Most readers are familiar with small lizards they see at the zoo and the fluffy pet mammals they may keep, from dogs to bunnies. But in prehistoric times, some reptiles and mammals were enormous, terrifying creatures! In this volume, readers can discover reptiles, mammals, sea creatures, and birds of the prehistoric era they may have never heard of. Fascinating details accompany illustrations of what each creature was likely to look like, and what...

Describes the role of fossils in tracing human evolution and compares Neanderthal people and their culture with the people of today.

Hundreds of millions of years before humans had evolved, our planet was already teeming with life. In prehistoric oceans, stony deserts, warm swamps and vast grasslands, there lived an incredible variety of plants and animals. Invertebrates made up a huge number of Earth's life forms. Among them, giant sea scorpions as big as a lion terrorised the oceans, enormous millipedes fed on plants in dense Carboniferous forests and tiny wasps preyed on cockroach...

Surveys different types of dinosaurs, discussing how they lived, why they died out, and the excavation of fossils.