THE CHICK-O-SAURUS

What fearsome creature has hatched from that innocuous-looking egg?

Juxtaposing artfully clipped stock photos with dino images, this tale invites young viewers to play a cleverly presented guessing game. Could the beady eye peeking out through a hole in the cracked shell belong to a…velociraptor? Do tracks leading away from bits of the broken eggshell mean that there’s a dinosaur loose in the book? Glimpses of “razor-sharp claws” and “bone-crushing jaws” lead to further speculation. It might be a T. Rex, “with a bite that could crush a car!” Or maybe a Utahraptor—“They used their claws as hooks to snare their prey, pin them down, and eat them alive!” writes the author with winning gusto. Or could it be a Deinonychus? “Their bite was as strong as the weight of 40 bricks pressing down on you.” Savvy readers will, of course, have caught the giveaway hint in the title, and a climactic photo of a chicken fixing its glance on a hapless earthworm (“The mighty Chick-o-saurus devours his prey”) will clue in the rest. An afterword lays out the dinosaur–chicken connection in detail, from the 19th-century discovery of the prehistoric bird Archaeopteryx to that of the feathered fossil Xiaotingia in 2011.

An arresting prehistoric primer, with a charmer of a twist ending.