“Sea Monsters – Prehistoric Creatures of the Deep,” written by Michael J. Everhart, adjunct curator of paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, was chosen as a 2008 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). The Quick Picks list suggests books that teens, ages 12-18, will pick up on their own and read for pleasure; it is geared to the teenager who, for whatever reason, does not like to read.

The book deals with marine reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs, with a primary focus on those that lived during the Late Cretaceous ... mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, and on the paleontologists who first discovered and described them. Many of these first specimens were found in Kansas during the 1870s and the book covers both the well known experts of the day (like Cope and Marsh) as well as the not-so-well- known collectors (Turner, Mudge, Webb, Williston and the Sternberg family) who were actually making most of the discoveries. “Sea Monsters – Prehistoric Creatures of the Deep” is written for general audiences and is illustrated with over a hundred color figures and photographs and is the official companion to the recently released IMAX movie of the same name.  

See all the 2008 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers

About the Author
 
Michael J. Everhart has been an adjunct curator of paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas since 1998 and is currently an adjunct instructor of biology at Cowley County Community College. He has been a member of SVP since 1989. Everhart is an expert on Late Cretaceous marine fossils of western Kansas and the history of paleontology in Kansas. He served as one of the senior science advisers on the National Geographic IMAX film, "Sea Monsters." He is the author of “Sea Monsters: Prehistoric Creatures of the Deep” (National Geographic, 2007) and “Oceans of Kansas – A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea” (Indiana University Press, 2005). Everhart  has also written many papers describing the fossils of the Smoky Hill Chalk, including the naming of a new species of a sea monster from Kansas (a mosasaur) called Tylosaurus kansasensis in 2005. He is the creator and webmaster of the award-winning “Oceans of Kansas Paleontology” Web site: www.oceansofkansas.com which has been on the Web since December, 1996.  He is currently the editor of the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science and is the Past President of the KAS.