Poor writing but a fun story (except for the tacky romance) and lots of neat details about the ecology. ( )

Sure, there were some errors that should have been caught by the proofreaders; I let them go. The storyline was too good to worry about that.

Scientist in a physics lab in a small University in North Dakota have been flirting with translocation experiments. some beetles that have been extinct for about 65 million years have bewilderingly showed up in their translocation vault. Not only that, but after a few days they disappear From the jars they've been put in. An accident transports three of the scientist back to the end of the Cretaceous era. they are thrown on their own resources, and quickly find daily life a matter of life-and-death struggle. Many dinosaurs are out to make them their meal. The three scientists, along with a dog, have an adventure that makes this a delightful book to read. I was actually sorry when it ended.

Some quotes I liked:
P.122
The Amazon jungle is not well understood. many of the species are either so rare or so remote that they are completely unknown to us. Small plants and insects, the foundation of that immense and complex system, are so numerous and diverse that scientists cannot hope to catalog the half of them; certainly not before the jungle is destroyed by agriculture and everything in it becomes extinct. How, then, can we understand the ecisystem of the late Cretaceous jungle, extinct for 65 million years? One thing we know: large animals would have been rare. You might have walked for days without seeing a single large, photogenic, scary carnivore.

P.263
we humans have developed a comforting, self - centered philosophy that helps to shield us from the dreadful truth. We put a high value on individual life, liberty, and happiness. But in the broad context of the history of the world, life is cheap and death is the only certainty. All species become extinct. Habitats change. Ecosystems develop and then collapse. Our own civilization will be gone soon enough, the way of triceratops horridus, the way of tyrannosaurus Rex.

In one part, where the dog Hilda has wandered off and is searching for her dinner, she gets knocked on the head by the tail of a dinosaur. I had come to love this little doggie so much that I actually started crying.
P.159
He reached out a hand towards Hilda's head and made a gesture of stroking it; but he didn't touch her.

She must have been badly injured, and crawled into the bush to die. As they stared at her it came over Julian that this was The Natural end of every wild animal, including themselves. They were looking at their own future, probably not too distant, and the vision they had of reaching their vague goal was mere idealistic prattle. Dr. Shanker pushed Julian aside. then he gently disentangled Hilda's body and laid her in the open, as if, even in death, she might be more happy in a comfortable position. He squatted and palpated her body to see how she had been injured. The blood came from her mouth, and blood coagulated in the fur of her muzzle and on her chest. It looked as if she'd been struck hard on the head or across the jaw. One side of her face was badly swollen and the flesh around the eye had puffed up and forced the lid closed. ( )

Set in both our time and 65 million years ago, CRETACEOUS DAWN is an exciting adventure story of 3 scientists, a security guard, and a dog, which are accidentally transported back in time. While investigators in our time work to understand what happened to the missing people, the adventurers work to find a way back to the present day.
While the writing is very exciting and informative as to what Earth was like way back then, I found a couple of glaring problems with the plot. First, I could find no answer as to why only 24 hours passed in present time, yet 2 months passed in Cretaceous time. Also, why didn’t the scientists yell for each other after Julian was washed down the river? They certainly used that means to find Hilda when she went missing. Unfortunately, these problems really bothered me and detracted from my overall enjoyment of what otherwise is a terrific book.
~Stephanie ( )

I picked this up expecting a time-travel romp with rampaging dinosaurs at every turn, and got something better: a well-researched, understated account of what life might be like for a small band of modern humans abruptly transported back to the Cretaceous, the era of Triceratops. Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus Rex.

It's great to read a book about dinosaurs in which the relative abundance of predators and prey is realistically portrayed, and in which there are actually long periods without predator attacks. As the small band of humans learns, however, just because predators are relatively rare doesn't mean that they are totally absent ...

The novel has a present-day police procedural element which I didn't find as convincing as the descriptions of life in the Cretaceous, but that's a small part of the book, and doesn't stop me from highly recommending this book to anyone who, like me, still harbours a fascination with the Age of the Dinosaurs. ( )