Dinosaurs!: Explorer

Young paleontologists take note. There is a new dinosaur book that will fascinate dino-loving youngsters, which would include just about all youngsters. Yet how can there be a truly fresh take on this most ancient of subjects? The Natural History Museum brought together a team of three authors and an illustrator to create this incredible new dinosaur book. Modeled almost as if it were field notes from an explorer and done in muted colors on heavy stock, this is different from other dinosaur books. Every page is packed with excellent information written in such a way as to speak to the middle-grade audience as if they were peers of the explorer and even part of the excavation team. The writing is crisp, the research shines, and the illustrations complete and support every chunk of text. Perhaps the pièce de résistance, though, is a timeline at the back that is a single sheet of heavy, glossy stock, the equivalent of nine pages, that covers 240 million years jam-packed with illustrations and small text blocks designed to be removed from the book and mounted on the wall. Youngsters (and others) will eat this book up. Don’t miss it.