Meat and potatoes—er, more meat for hatchling dinosaur fans, with unusually eye-catching art.
An invitation to meet a prehistoric predator and follow it from egg to exhibit.
Sounding like a slightly more articulate version of Guardians of the Galaxy’s Groot (“I am Allosaurus. I can run”), a theropod narrator hatches and survives. It avoids being eaten by larger toothy prowlers while chowing down on a dragonfly (when small) and a stegosaur (when fully grown), then passes in an abrupt page turn from Jurassic landscapes to a museum setting, towering as a fossil skeleton over human silhouettes with a final “I am Allosaurus. I am extinct.” The extreme terseness of the text and patterned repetition makes this an ideal choice for dinosaur lovers just stretching their own independent-reading legs. Along with depicting his dino with an arresting pattern of deep black stripes on a bright pink body, with vivid blue rings around its eyes, Bradley follows a current train of paleontological thought by adding a ruff of hairy feathers that vanishes as the animal matures. Dramatic shifts in perspective neatly capture scale as the reptile grows. Bradley also carefully keeps other flora and fauna in his painted scenes true to period and closes with notes on his subject’s anatomy, a map showing where Allosaurus remains have been found, and related information.
Meat and potatoes—er, more meat for hatchling dinosaur fans, with unusually eye-catching art. (bibliography) (Informational picture book/early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64351-749-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Arbordale Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Fine fare for younger dinosaur lovers, particularly those of a hands-on sort.
A set of pop-up prehistoric specimens to assemble and insert in a museum exhibit.
Two young tour guides, “Mary” (after Mary Anning) and “Barnum” (after Barnum Brown), squire readers through a soon-to-open dinosaur hall. There they point out slots where each of the five pop-up models—of Stegosaurus, Liopleurodon, Pteranodon, and Triceratops as well as T. Rex skulls—can be (gluelessly) attached and add side comments to the already-placed explanatory and descriptive labels. Neatly hidden beneath a large front flap along with printed assembly diagrams that make matching the various slots and tabs relatively easy, the large punch-out pieces turn into simplified but reasonably realistic models. Smaller specimens of dino poop, a fossilized egg, and other enhancements also have waiting slots in side cases. The pop-ups aren’t the whole show, either, as the parts of the exhibit already in place in the background illustrations and narrative boxes offer a basic but solid picture of dinosaurian types, features, and habits. Mary presents black, and Barnum presents white.
Fine fare for younger dinosaur lovers, particularly those of a hands-on sort. (Informational novelty. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78868-128-5
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
A perfunctory effort.
A select set of pop-up prehistoric portraits, with bite-sized facts for dedicated dinophiles.
In contrast to previous Curious Kids outing Explore the Meadow (2020), this gallery has a slapdash air. Including a less-than-melodramatic opening tableau that features a sauropod who looks almost comically resigned to becoming a theropod’s next meal, five of the eight central pop-ups are just static portraits that hover over stylized prehistoric backdrops. Of the other three, one offers a face-on T. rex with a comically tiny (but toothy) mouth and another, a giant meteorite that actually rises as the spread opens. The fact bits scattered at random are occasionally mind-blowing (“Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus lived further apart in time than Tyrannosaurus and humankind”) but more often run to obvious truisms, misstatements (no, Diplodocus was not conclusively the longest dino), or outright non sequiturs: “Some were FEROCIOUS! Others were TALL.” Some of the real-world comparisons do not provide sufficient context: “Even a pig would have been able to run past [Ankylosaurus] with ease”—but how fast does a pig run? Moreover, all but one of the dinosaurs posing on the first and last spreads go unidentified, and Marx also manages to leave birds out of his closing list of dinosaur-age survivals. It’s a shame given the child-attracting combination of topic and format. Companion title Stars and Space publishes simultaneously.
A perfunctory effort. (Informational pop-up book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68010-653-4
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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