A breezy look at the flora and fauna of 250–320 million years ago. Some of it, notably the hardy cockroach, is still with us; more, including giant, treelike lycopods (“Their young looked like hairy telephone poles, the full-grown ones like something out of a Dr. Seuss book”) or the many-legged, six-foot-long Arthropleura—shown here next to a startled modern sunbather for scale—vanished in a mysterious mass extinction. Bonner surrounds a lively, specific narrative punctuated, but not weighted down, by tongue-twisting scientific names with a gallery of simply drawn, precisely detailed land and sea life—along with the occasional single or strip cartoon featuring, for instance, a toothy prehistoric meteorologist tracking climatic changes, or a primeval newspaper bearing the headline: WATERPROOF EGG A REALITY!” She then sums up the entire history of life on this planet with an illustrated timeline (featuring a bowl of “Primordial Soup”), and closes with cogent suggestions for further paper and Web resources. Dinosaurs tend to get all the press; young readers who wonder where they came from will find some answers here, memorably delivered. (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7922-6326-X
Page Count: 56
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A change of pace from the typical blood-and-guts approach to the topic, populous enough to sate even the most rabid...
A quick trip through the Mesozoic Era with a paleontologist is all young Ronnie needs to become a dino-maniac.
So desperate is Ronnie to better a dinosaur exam’s failing grade that she’s willing to follow her odd but scholarly neighbor Miss Lernin into a curbside recycling bin—which, thanks to “Science Magic,” leaves the two in the late Triassic. Between meeting plateosaurs on that stop and a cozy nuzzle with a T. rex in the late Cretaceous, Ronnie gets an earful about dinosaur anatomy, convergent evolution, types of prehistoric life, protofeathers and other recent discoveries, and (as Miss Lernin puts it) “the exciting world of…phylogenetic trees!!” But mostly what she gets are dinosaurs. The graphic panels teem with (labeled) prehistoric life including, along with dozens of dinos, many early mammals and other contemporaries. Howard depicts nearly all of this fauna with snub noses and such friendly expressions that in no time (so to speak) Ronnie is exclaiming “Oh my gosh…Jurassic crocodylomorphs were so cute!” Indeed, her white tutor agrees, but also cool, dangerous, and majestic. Ronnie, who is depicted as a black girl, returns to the present to earn a perfect score on a retaken test and go on to spread the dino-word to her diverse classmates. Though the lack of source or resource lists is disappointing, closing graphic recaps of major prehistoric creatures and, yes, a phylogenetic tree provide some review.
A change of pace from the typical blood-and-guts approach to the topic, populous enough to sate even the most rabid dinophiles. (glossary) (Graphic informational fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2306-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers in search of unalloyed wish fulfillment thickly layered with melodramatic posturing and gore-free, comics-style...
A bullying victim saves Earth after his brain is transferred into the body of a T. Rex.
Stomped flat by a huge green foot in the wake of a humiliating encounter with aptly named white classmate Melvin Goonowitz, Ralph, a nerdy boy with light-brown skin, wakes to discover that thanks to local handyman/superscientist Professor Overdrive, he’s not dead but inhabiting a toothy, if tiny-armed, dinosaur brought from the distant past. Why? Because Earth is commanded to send a champion to join 10,000 other gladiators in the interstellar Coliseum of Crunch to fight one another for the continued existence of their planets. Next to the wildly diverse array of glowering, garishly hued, mightily thewed aliens filling the graphic panels, Ralph looks like Barney’s little green brother—but with pluck and luck he not only bumbles his way to an epic win, he rescues a blue-skinned new friend from a sexual predator. Back to Earth in triumph he goes to scare Goonowitz into peeing his pants, then switch into a boy again (in a cloned bod courtesy of Professor Overdrive) with an ongoing new mission to protect little guys from getting picked on. A note about real gladiators of the ancient Roman sort is tacked on at the end.
Readers in search of unalloyed wish fulfillment thickly layered with melodramatic posturing and gore-free, comics-style violence need look no further. (Graphic fantasy/science fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4494-7208-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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