Ocean Renegades! (Earth Before Us #2): Journey through the Paleozoic Era

Another excellent adventure with Ronnie and Miss Lernin! This one details all the bizarre creatures that lived before the time of the dinosaurs, and how some of them evolved to become animals we know today. It's really interesting to see life from the just barely multicellular level all the way through giant land animals! The whole Earth Before Us is definitely worth a read for everyone who likes evolutionary history, young and old!

I'd preordered this because Dinosaur Empire was so colossally good. It took me a week to finally pry it away from my 3rd grader. "Oh no honey, don't read that science book cover to cover, Daddy really wants it back!" Sucker.Anyway, this book is one of my favorite things: someone awesome is deeply interested in something I know nothing about. The drawings range from kooky to adorable to terrifying. My favorite part of this series continues to be how it layers in "this is how we know X" and "here's how our understanding has changed." All the challenging words have phonetic spellings, and all the challenging ideas have a respectful explanation. Speaking as a grown-up, I learned a lot and never felt talked down to.If you're a human older than about 8, this book is for you. Whatever Abby wants to write about next, I want to learn about it.

I got this and "Dinosaur Empire" at the same time. I received this book and tore through it! The book covers evolution, ecosystems, paleontology, the process of science, and much more and makes it memorable and easy to comprehend. Yet it is still high level and in no way talks down to its audience - adults and children alike will enjoy it! It is an up-to-date book on dinosaurs (did you know they have feathers now?) and also introduces you to a menagerie of amazing animals, plants and other from our planet's past. You might find yourself trawling the web to learn even more information on your favorite critters that you never knew existed! After finishing the series (as it is so far), I felt such a glow of amazement and wonder that I immediately got copies for all of my nieces and nephews. Thanks Abby!

First off, this book accomplishes the impossible. How can you fit this much information into a book which is so engaging to a young child? My daughters are 4 and 6. Most of the books they like have fewer words than one page of this book. Yet they begged me to read it to them each night. They laughed. They cried. They learned.If I have any complaints about this book, it's only in comparison to its excellent predecessor, Dinosaur Empire. I felt that the frame story and organization weren't as strong in this book. Because there are more diverse animals discussed here, some more family trees to put the different lineages in context would have gone a long way.Keep up the good work, Ms. Howard!

This book's a delight! Packed full of fascinating facts, colorful art, and fast-moving patter, this is a good book for both kids and parents to read together. The call-and-response nature of the characters makes for a great read on its own, but it's also ideally made for a parent and a child to each read the parts of each character as the story goes on. It's also helpfully broken up by the different ancient ages, so you can break it up into a multi-session read - especially handy given the density of the pages. If the page isn't crammed full of facts about ancient life, it's filled with one of many gorgeous montages of ancient underwater creatures.

These books continue to be understandable while also chock-full of learnin that even an adult like me can turn around and share at all his friends and make them all go “WHAT!?” The art is incredibly detailed while maintaining a kids-book feel of color and readability. Also, it has a lot of cephalopods in it, which is my favorite group of animals ever!

This series combines everything we want from a "dinosaur" book (weird creatures! complex names!) with elegant explanations of biology, evolution, and paleontology. While the previous book covers the Mesozoic, this one focuses on earlier eras, paying special attention to the transition from ocean life to land-based life. Howard has a gift for anatomical drawing and graphic novel pacing-- she includes frequent "splash pages" that showcase her subjects in scale, and is careful to recap lessons already learned. Factual, fun... I strongly recommend this for paleontology and graphic novel nuts.

My child, who is obsessed with paleontology, got SO MUCH out of this beautiful book. It is full of knowledge that isn't usually shared in this kind of format. The art is gorgeous, the author's voice is unique. My child LOVES sharing facts from this book and it seemed to really strike a chord for them. Big, big fan of this artist and we cannot wait for the next book!

Love the idea of exploring the paleocene (Cambrian explosion yes!) but ultimately this book isn't as good as the others in the series. You get the feeling that the author is not as impressed as she tries to make the characters at all the small early life.There are so many weird and crazy forms going on in the Cambrian and so many interesting details to dig into in the following eras, but you just get the sense that the story is rushing you through a biology class, hoping that you get to the part where there are large creatures to look at.Pictures are nice, but the info and energy leaves a lot to be desired, I don't think my son is going to be asking me to read this one again, unlike the others in the series.

Bought for my kid, but I think I'm enjoying it more! The large number of difficult to pronounce animal and plant names can be daunting, but the sound-it-out guides are seamlessly included in the dialog. Amazing and vibrant art from Abby Howard's creative and scientifically literate mind, and just a dash of humour as her two main characters travel through the past. Ocean Renegades is a great book for anyone who loves science and art and who has ever though some arthropods would have made super cute pets... So long as they don't fly at / try to eat your face!

My 7 year old flat out adores these books. So much I am actually having trouble getting him to read anything else. His entire bookcase full of books is getting ignored, and he just wants to read each book of this series over and over. I can't blame him as they are fantastic! The illustrations are excellent/amazing and the story is engaging and so informative and interesting. I have learnt so much about dinosaurs and natural history through these books as an adult as well! I would love it if the author continued making more graphic novels like this, they are unique and amazing.

Fantastic- my 7 year olds fav book “ever”

Great book! Love the illustrations and love to learn new ancient animal facts.