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A Field Guide to Dinosaurs: The essential handbook for travelers in the Mesozoic by Henry Gee and Luis V. Rey, Barrons Educational/Aurum Press, $24.95/拢16.99, ISBN 0764155113 Reviewed by Jeff Hecht

鈥淭HIS is a work of fiction,鈥� says the introduction, but author Henry Gee and artist Luis Rey didn鈥檛 make all of it up. They began with the facts known from dinosaur fossils, then extrapolated other details that aren鈥檛 evident from the bones. In one sense, that鈥檚 not a dramatic step beyond painting colour portraits of dinosaurs, since fossils preserve no clue of colour. Yet it is also a daring move because the casual reader won鈥檛 know immediately what is based on solid science and what comes from the fertile imaginations of Gee and Rey.

Your best bet is to relax and enjoy A Field Guide to Dinosaurs in the playful spirit the authors intended. To portray dinosaurs as living creatures, they have to describe behaviour and other traits that simply do not fossilise. They fill the knowledge gap by borrowing real behaviours from living animals. Makers of popular documentaries do much the same thing, but they generally do not warn viewers.

Rey鈥檚 brightly coloured, fluffy-feathered dinosaurs may look strange at first, until you realise that his models are their closest living kin 鈥� birds. Like modern bird artists, he favours the flashy parrots over the drab sparrows. Traditional dinosaur art shows the beasts in profile, but Rey brings their faces up front, so readers get a lunch鈥檚-eye view of the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex, the giant plant-eating Diplodocus, and dozens of others. The paintings are remarkably up to date. All that is missing are the flight feathers on the legs and arms of Microraptor, reported only after the book went to press. Great fun for dinophiles.