I think this is the first time I've written a book review for a book I've read before! And what a weird book to choose? Having ploughed through Fantastic Beasts and then found myself constantly comparing that book to Kong, it only felt fair to pick it back up and see if it still remains the gold standard that I hold it to for creature design books. And yes, yes it does!

The art is fantastic, the book itself has a well-written narrative, and the world building it achieves is nothing less than fascinating. I love the intricacies of the creatures, as well as the sheer diversity, but the real win here is the depth of detail. Whilst the book is formed primarily from pictures, there is still a great deal of writing, and it's all great, interesting stuff. There's no discussion directly on how the creature designs were come to, but the deep-dives into skeletal anatomy and natural history, some of which cover several double page spreads, tell you everything you need to know without having to spell it out. Why do the V-Rex look different to T-Rex? Oh, their skulls have foreshortened due to specific environmental causes? That's cool. How do you explain giant leeches capable of eating a man whole? Ah, they're actually living in a geothermally-heated mire and are descended from dinosaur parasites, that almost works (it's a cool idea, at least, and the fact someone bothered to come up with that backstory is cool too).

Yes, there's a lot of fantasy and no, many of the fantastical creatures don't actually work (I'm fairly certain 12 foot spiders would suffocate) but the thought processes are present. There are far too many predators, and they've been a little too liberal on which time periods these were drawn from, with creatures supposedly marooned on the island when it broke from Gondwana that hadn't existed for millions of years already (looking at you, synapsids that have barely changed since the Triassic, despite having gone extinct three epochs prior to this island diverging). Creature design is also a little too "tooth and claw" for me, though that at least is partially explained.

But still, it remains one of the greatest tie-in books ever created and, if you enjoy speculative biology, I think A History of Skull Island should be considered a must-read. Primate-bats? Several clades of flying lizards? Flying frogs, including a break-down of how tadpole morphology would work? Carrion parrots? Flightless pterosaurs? Frugivorous chameleons? Bird eggs that encourage moss growth as a hiding mechanism? The book is packed with clever little ideas and interestingly plausible island modifications; that it does so with clades stretching back to the Cambrian may get a little ridiculous, but means that constraints are rarely a problem!