Meet the dinosaurs by Caryl Hart. Illus. by Bethan Woollvin

A young girl and her companion travel through the past ages from Jurassic to Cretaceous showcasing several dinosaurs from these eras. Starting with the Jurassic, we see a number of large animals, including Diplodocus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus before heading into the Cretaceous period. Each page has rhyming verses about the animal encouraging readers to predict the rhyming word and read along with the reader. Each page also shows characteristics of the animal in question, what it may look like, its size and its traits, including what it eats, how it survives and its interaction with other animals. Readers will be enthralled, seeing the animals on each page, the book covering ten different dinosaurs over nearly 200 million years until extinction 60 million years ago. Each double page shows the animal and the environment in which it lives. Children will be intrigued at the range of environments shown. 

I loved the book, as it shows the usual range but also shows that there were some that flew and survived in the sea. Hints about dinosaurs are given, allowing children to ask questions and think about questions like why did they die out, or how they lived for so long, or what are the skeletons seen in many museums.

Bright colourful illustrations cover each page, showing the girl and her companion in a jeep, rather like the film, Jurassic Park, but without the scary bits.  I loved the time line given at the end of the book, reinstating the facts learnt in the book, and showing a simple overview easily decipherable by eager young readers.

Themes: Dinosaurs, Jurassic, Museums, STEM, Science, Palaeontology.

Fran Knight