Basal or just based?

A review of "A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and Other Winged Dinosaurs" (Kindle Edition) 

This is a “field guide” to the birds of the dinosaur age (the Mesozoic). Since birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs, it's not entirely clear where “dinosaurs” (or non-avian dinosaurs) end and “birds” begin. The guide therefore includes some creatures which until recently were considered dinosaurs (in the vernacular sense) rather than birds (again, in the vernacular sense). Here's a fascinating quote: “The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like Velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like Velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.” The same is true of Deinonychus, the actual “raptor” of the Hollywood flick “Jurassic Park”.

The Kindle edition of this book is unfortunately badly edited. While the text and the illustrations are good, the latter have no captions, so a reader browsing the e-book can't know which birds are being illustrated! For a field guide, this is a major shortcoming. As for the text, it includes an extensive introduction (mostly about bird evolution) and shorter descriptions of various Mesozoic bird species written in field guide style. To be honest, it's a quite boring and slightly technical work, unless you have a nerdy interest in…guess what…Mesozoic birds (and perhaps cladistics).

Due to the editing, I will only give the Kindle version three stars. Still, if you *do* have a nerdy interest in basal (or based) avialans & co, investing in the physical book edition might be a good idea…