Review: Fossils for Kids, by Ashley Hall

There's a lot to like and not much to quibble about in paleontologist Ashley Hall's excellent book  for gradeschool fossil-lovers.  
The dinosaurs get center stage at first, but Hall spends nearly as much time on other vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants.  (Having worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Hall of course includes its most famous fossil, the armored fish Dunkleosteus: she mentions the nickname "the Cleveland Cleaver," which is one I hadn't heard before.)  She intersperses all this with good explanations of things like how fossils form and how they are dated, adding in mentions of famous paleontologists and some student acitivites. 
The writing is clear, the illustrations are excellent, and the science is up-to-the-minute, which is REALLY hard to do in 21st century paleontology. I've been reading about dinosaurs for fifty years, and I still learned some things. 
Some nitpicks: The first page mentions Miocene fossils, but the Miocene is never defined. A few pages devoted to individual species (e.g.,the the shark Cretalamna) show partial fossils and could use an image of what the whole animal looked like.  



These are minor things, though, in a first-rate book that fills a gap for the future scientist.  (I wish I'd had something like this so many years back!)  It doesn't hurt that Hall herself is an example reminding kids that women belong in this field, too. Every school library in America needs a few copies of this book.