Sea Monsters: Prehistoric Predators of the Deep (Walking With Dinosaurs Special) Book

Sea Monsters is the book version of the latest offering from the BBC TV "Walking With" series, except that this one is really "Diving with Sea Monsters". It has all the ingredients we have come to expect, especially the superb computer graphics that really bring these extinct beasts to life and the numerous gobsmacking colour plates. The sleek bodies of these sea creatures lend themselves particularly well to the technique. They look extraordinarily convincing as they have a go at presenter Nigel Marven in his armoured diving suit and metal cage. Written by the well-known TV presenter Nigel Marven and producer/director Jasper James, Sea Monsters tells the story of a huge range of extinct beasts from Ordovician times, through some 450 million years of geological time and the evolution of marine life. Although the first life on Earth was aquatic, for the first four billion and more years it was all microscopic. About 600 million years ago sea creatures began to get bigger but none of them was anything much more than a metre in length until Ordovician and Silurian times when the marine arms race began with both predators and prey increasing significantly in size. Things got really interesting in Devonian times when some bizarre fish evolved as active predators including the spectacularly ferocious nine-metre long Dunkleosteus. This magnificent creature had tough bony armoured plates all over its head and blades of bone instead of teeth. Life in the seas has been dangerous ever since, as successions of large predatory sharks, bony fish, marine reptiles and mammals have evolved and replaced one another. Today's great white shark might have notoriety as an awesome predator but it is small beer compared with Liopleurodon, the 20-metre or so marine reptile of Jurassic times or the more recent shark Megalodon whose teeth were palm sized and whose jaws opened to around 2.5 metres wide. It's all spendidly bloodthirsty stuff for children of any age from 9 to 99. --Douglas PalmerRead More