by Daniel Loxton ▪ Kids Can Press ▪ Ages 4-7
“Prehistoric creatures sport feathers, wrinkles, teeth and scales that are all rendered with hyper-realistic clarity and sharpness. … Dino devotees will devour this eye candy with relish.” –Kirkus
Story: Follow the pterosaur, a majestic flying reptile, as he encounters a pack of tiny but vicious dinosaurs. A unique blend of digital illustrations and landscape photography brings the ensuing battle to life. PTEROSAUR TROUBLE is book two in the Tales of Prehistoric Lives series. Dramatic stories + eye-popping visuals = a surefire hit with young dinosaur lovers.Story behind the story: "The Tales of Prehistoric Life series," says author Daniel Loxton," strives to attain very high degree of photorealism — I want it to look like I just grabbed my camera and popped back to the Cretaceous in my time machine. To achieve that, I borrow a lot of tricks from Hollywood special effects and visual effects. But there's a big problem with that: Hollywood techniques tend to be very expensive, and work best with huge crews and huge movie industry budgets. We don't have any of that!
The creatures I select for my stories are sculpted inside a computer as entirely virtual creatures by my collaborator Jim Smith. After expert feedback from our science consultant and a large number of revision cycles, I wrap realistic skin textures around them. That's a laborious, detail-oriented process. The skin texture maps have so much resolution that they're each equivalent to a 67 megapixel photograph! I hand paint much of that detail, but for realism it starts once again with photographic reference from nature: detailed photographs of modern living animals from zoos and preserved specimens in museum collections. Bats, pheasants, and herons were especially useful for Pterosaur Trouble.
Although these books are fiction for kids, they are nonetheless informed by the true scientific discoveries of paleontology. In fact, the basic conflict of Pterosaur Trouble was inspired by a specific fossil find from Alberta, Canada. Scientific accuracy is very important to me, to the extent that I actually went back into Ankylosaur Attack to make a correction AFTER it was published: Throughout the process for Pterosaur Trouble and the third book (in production now), I've kept in close contact with our science consultant, palaeozoologist Darren Naish. He clears all of the basic plot points, reviews the creature designs, and checks the story for scientific accuracy. See more here.
Reviews and praise:
"Pterosaur Trouble is a terrific example of how to make a popular book on prehistoric animals both exciting and scientifically sound, an accolade that is all the more remarkable when you consider that a part of its targeted demographic is still learning to read....I get the feeling that real effort was made to render animals which would satisfy fully fledged palaeontologists as much as children. … there are lots of little details to appreciate."
- Mark Winton, paleontologist, author of Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy (Princeton University Press, June 2013).
“…the prehistoric creatures sport feathers, wrinkles, teeth and scales that are all rendered with hyper-realistic clarity and sharpness. … Dino devotees will devour this eye candy with relish.”
–Kirkus
Read an interview with the author on Wired's GEEKMOM blog, and Scientific American. Plus Daniel writes for Junior Skeptic, the 10-page critical thinking publication for kids bound inside Skeptic magazine.
FYI: ALL THE REVIEW COPIES FOR THIS BOOK HAVE BEEN SENT. CHECK OUT THE "COMMENTS" LINK TO READ WHAT YOUR COLLEAGUES HAVE TO SAY.
FYI: ALL THE REVIEW COPIES FOR THIS BOOK HAVE BEEN SENT. CHECK OUT THE "COMMENTS" LINK TO READ WHAT YOUR COLLEAGUES HAVE TO SAY.
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