Books on the Prehistoric World

From gigantic plant eaters to terrifying carnivores, dinosaurs and the long-lost worlds they inhabited capture the imaginations of children everywhere. Because it's such a popular topic, there are vast numbers of dinosaur books for kids out there. Our Children’s Editor talked to Daniel (age 6) and Caleb (age 7), two young dinosaur book enthusiasts, to find out which ones they have really enjoyed, and would like to recommend to other kids their age and younger.

All archaeologists have to do some imagining because the data they work with is so partial and fragmentary, says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. She picks five books that help bring to life our closest relations, from a historical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning writer to a work of sci-fi about a hybrid Neanderthal child.

Thanks to scientific advances, we're finding out more and more about prehistoric people, including women and their lives during the Upper Paleolithic era. French filmmaker Thomas Cirotteau, director of the documentary and co-author of a book about Lady Sapiens, recommends books to find out more about our female ancestors, who while separated from us by tens of thousands of years, have been brought tantalizingly close by new techniques and discoveries.

Evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro tells us why it's impossible to clone a mammoth, and why we might want to. She guides us through five inspiring books to get us thinking about extinction and the role genetics could potentially play in maintaining biodiversity.

Paleoanthropologist Tim White tells us about his work investigating the origins of homo sapiens and explains what a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton he found in Africa tells us about our common past.

Many of the 1,200 known species of dinosaur were far more complex than we once thought. Some were brightly feathered and many were at least partly warm-blooded, explains palaeontologist and dinosaur specialist Paul Barrett. He talks us through five of the best dinosaur books, from 1980s trailblazers to the latest technical tomes.

Palaeontologist Richard Fortey says it took tiny organisms two billion years of work to oxygenate the planet sufficiently for our kind of life, including trilobites, dinosaurs and ourselves, to evolve