When I was a kid, I was so into dinosaurs that I wanted to be a paleontologist. Eventually, astronomy won out, but it was touch-and-go there for a while (my compromise: study giant impacts that wiped out the dinosaurs).

When I was that age, my dad used to make tape recordings and send them to relatives instead of written letters, so that family members could hear the voices of the kids. I remember quite specifically one day picking a description about the ankylosaur for my part of the "letter". I talked about its clubbed tail, and how it used that weapon to fend off ravenous carnivores.

So back when I was 5 I would’ve loved to have had a book like my friend Daniel Loxton’s new work, Ankylosaur Attack. It’s a great, lavishly-illustrated hardcover for kids about the day in the life of a young dinosaur: feeding, watching pterosaurs, meeting up with other ankylosaurs, and then, of course, the T. Rex attack!

Daniel is an artist, so the book is illustrated with amazing photo-realistic images of the creatures, which I’m sure will get any dinosaur-enthusiast kid’s heart pumping. The story itself is based on current thinking in paleontological circles about dinosaur behavior, and it presents dinosaurs not as giant monsters but as inhabitants of the same world in which we live, just way back in the past.

Daniel’s last book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, was fantastic, so I’m not surprised this one is so good, too.

It’s available on Amazon.com of course, and would make a great present for the holidays coming up. Thanksgiving is a traditional family get-together time in the US, so I’m sure there are kids who would love to get a copy of this and read it with the grandparents. Just a hint there.

You can follow Daniel on Twitter, or read his articles on SkepticBlog (where he’s written a few about what went into making the book).

My friend, Daniel Loxton, is a skeptic, a writer, and a deep thinker. He has a habit of taking contentious issues and wrestling with them, then writing them out in enough detail that an interesting discussion can ensue. We’ve tussled over one or two topics before, but in general I find myself agreeing with his stance on things.

He’s written a good two-piece article on skepticism. They were inspired by an article written by a believer who is a friend of the skeptic musician George Hrab (Geo’s a friend of mine too). This believer attended a meeting George was at, and wrote a lengthy piece about how he saw the skeptic community. The author said he finds he loves his faith, and while he sees some merit in skepticism, he doesn’t think he’ll ever become a skeptic. He may be right… but I wonder. While some people dismissed his article as being just another mushy-headed piece on faith (some people on Twitter said as much), I actually found his thinking to be heartening. He is just the kind of person who might actually turn to critical thinking given the chance. At the very least, he’s not prejudiced against skeptics, thinking we’re all a bunch of curmudgeonly nay-sayers. That’s a necessary first step.
(more…)

Skeptic Magazine’s website has a new feature I like: short bios of important skeptics.

Daniel Loxton, the creator of this series, also made banners to put a face on skepticism. The face featured here is for the tireless and wondrous and totally awesome Swoopy^*, who runs the Skepticality podcast with Derek Colanduno.

I suspect you might recognize some of the others there too. And if you don’t, get to know them! You’ll be happy you did. But don’t believe me. Prove it for yourself.

We’re having a big problem in America these days, with the forces of antireality on the march to deceive our children. Evolution is a big target for them, of course, and I need not belabor the battle here.

But what can we do? We need to excite kids about the real world, and about evolution in particular. And we need to do it in a wonderful way, grabbing their attention, staying positive, and revealing all the beauty and majesty of the way life has self-propagated on this planet of ours.

Daniel Loxton has come to the rescue! He’s the brain behind Skeptic Magazine’s Junior Skeptic, a terrific feature designed to get young kids thinking. His experience putting that together is clear in his new book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be. This book has everything for younger readers: excellent writing, simple yet compelling layout, and a diversity of topics in evolution and its related studies which give the reader a solid background in evolutionary biology. That’s critical, as it gives them a basis on which they can build when they read more about the topic.

And Daniel covers a lot of topics, like transitional fossils, population growth, diversity of species, how we know that life changes over time, mutations, natural selection, and more. He even deals simply and efficiently with the topic of religion at the very end, telling the reader to talk to family, friends, and religious leaders about it. While I might disagree with him a bit (really, just a bit) over the boundaries of religion and science we’ve had a few discussion on Twitter about this — I think he deals with the topic elegantly in the book. After all, the book isn’t about religion, and instead of being arrogant or dismissive, he relies on the book itself being an effective treatment of the topic. I think that was a shrewd move.

And I simply cannot praise the illustrations enough, which were done by Daniel himself. WOW! The drawings are simply magnificent; the Archeopteryx on the cover will grab any kid’s attention, as will the gorgeous T-Rex on the first page. My favorite drawing was this one, which he also uses as a banner for the book:

It shows two women of different eras, and it beautifully demonstrates our similarities and differences. And the woman on the right is an actual human — Daniel’s wife! — something of a well-known skeptic herself. I bet if you come to TAM with a copy of the book, you can find her yourself and get both her and Daniel to sign it…

I think this book is absolutely terrific, and if you’re looking for a simple statement about it, then how about this? Simply put, I would’ve loved this book when I was a kid. It would have made me want to be a scientist.

You can get buy a copy of Evolution through the Skeptics.com website, or if you donate $100 they’ll send you a copy for free. I know, it’s not really free then, but you’ll be helping out a good group of skeptics, so it’s a good thing to do. If you prefer, it’s also available on Amazon and Amazon.ca.

My suggestion: buy several copies and give them away as gifts to kids. And maybe one for your local school as well. I know they could use it there.