I have been a lifelong dinosaur enthusiast. At the age of four, I created what my mother has dubbed my “first research paper”: a stack of illustrations of every different species I could find throughout the pages of my many dinosaur books. I’ve collected dinosaur books throughout my life, and recently I embarked on a search for a very specific sort of tome: a truly comprehensive, informative, encyclopedic collection of all known dinosaurs.

I have been a lifelong dinosaur enthusiast. At the age of four, I created what my mother has dubbed my “first research paper”: a stack of illustrations of every different species I could find throughout the pages of my many dinosaur books. I’ve collected dinosaur books throughout my life, and recently I embarked on a search for a very specific sort of tome: a truly comprehensive, informative, encyclopedic collection of all known dinosaurs. Needless to say, a wide variety of dinosaur-themed texts have been available throughout the years, but try as I might, I couldn’t locate any volume that really fit the bill.

Aliens Among Us is a long-standing trope of science fiction. Strange creatures from another world invade, take over the planet, and bend earthlings to their will. In the most frightening versions of this story, the hapless humans are unaware of or perhaps beguiled by their alien overlords. But that is science fiction. In science fact, we have plants. They did not come from another world.

If I were, at about age twenty as a budding paleozoologist and paleoartist, handed a copy of this book by a mysterious time traveler, I would have been shocked as well as delighted. The pages would reveal a world of new flesh- and, in some cases, plant-eating dinosaurs and ideas that I barely had a hint of or had no idea existed at all. My head would spin at the revelation of the therizinosaurs, such as the wacky feathered Beipiaosaurus, and at the biplane flying dromaeosaurs, not to mention the little halszkaraptors with their duck-like beaks, the brow horns and atrophied arms of bulldog-faced Carnotaurus, or the bat-like membranous wings of scansoriopterygids.