Cryptid Creatures: A Field Guide

Great quirky book for the coffee table, I really enjoy the illustrations too

This book is BEAUTIFUL! My 6 year old son is obsessed with cryptids so I picked it up for him and he slept with it the first night. It’s now sitting on display in my home because the illustrations are so lovely. Full of cool info and well laid out. If you have even a passing interest, this book is great!

Formatted like a field guide, "Cryptid Creatures" presents its subject as if your next hike into the woods might bring you face to face with some towering anthropoid or extinction-defying pterosaur in need of positive identification. Halls' brisk, uncynical prose fills the pages with information about location, year first sighted, eye-witness accounts, creature behavior, and a believability star rating ranging from confirmed hoax (eg., Piltdown Man) to confirmed reality (eg., Hogzilla). While aimed at kids -- and what kid isn't fascinated by these critters at some point? -- the text is not in any way condescending or dumbed-down; this guide is for anyone who is interested in these mysterious creatures which tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the world outside ourselves.The field guide conceit offers illustrator Spears with the opportunity to flex his mad imagination-meets-natural history skills to render what these creatures might look like not only as intimidating adults, but also as cute babies, or what the skull of a half-human/half-fish (or -wolf or -ape, etc.) might look like were you to trip over one lying on the forest floor. You can tell Spears had a field day bringing these beasts to life with a style that mixes a sketch-artist confidence with well-observed detail and a knowledge of anatomical morphology.My only niggles are that a couple of the illustrations fall across the gutter, making them hard to see, and the light yellow-orange text in places is a little hard for readers like me to see well in low light. Also, I did see a Trumpish misspelling of the country Namibia (Nambia) in one spot, in an otherwise well-edited and proofread text.All in all, a fun resource for all ages.

I bought this for my 8 year old son who loves mythology and mysterious creature stories. He loves it and so does my 5 year old daughter. I was cautious at first thinking maybe it would be scary for them but it's not. A nice touch that we all like about this book is that along with every cryptid drawing, there is also a drawing of the baby or juvenile of the same kind. Some of those pictures are really cute and my kids love them.

delivered fast and in good shape