Dinosaurs!
My First Book About Carnivores,
by “Dinosaur George” Blasing
Illustrations by
Annalisa and Marina Durante
Rockridge Press
6/2/2020
Juvenile Nonfiction/Animals
Age Range: 4-8 years
68 pages
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I just presented this amazing French novel where the main character goes to the limit of what is humanly bearable to try to find a brontosaurus. So today, we’ll go a bit deeper into these extinct animals, with Dinosaurs! My First Book About Carnivores.

The first striking thing about the book Dinosaurs! My First Book About Carnivores is definitely its colors. They are very bright and attractive to young children, I would assume. 

The book first sets the dinosaurs in their time period.
The sentences are short and easy to understand.
Then 30 dinosaurs are portrayed. In the introduction, it is specified that paleontologists have discovered at least 700 kinds of dinosaurs. It would have been interesting to specify what made these 30 interesting enough to include in this book, and not others. I was actually surprised not to find anything on the Brontosaurus or the Apatosaurus.

The 30 dinosaurs are grouped according to the period they lived in: theTriassic, the Jurassic, or the Creatceous period.
Pages of each period have a different background color, and the name of the period is also written at the bottom of each page.

For each dinosaur, there’s an illustration on the left page, sometimes containing bubbles with a few facts (for instance page 18: Allosaurus may have been able to run up to 30 miles per hour!).
On the right page, you find the name of the dinosaur and easy phonetics to pronounce it (like a: MEG-uh-low-SWAR-us for megalosaurus), then a few lines of general presentation.
Each dinosaur comes with a chart specifying length, height, weight, When, Where, what it ate, and what size it was, using simple examples, like the size of  a house car or of a school bus!
The right page has more bubbles, with more quick facts, for instance the Gallimimus  “swallowed small stones to help grind the food in its stomach.”

The book ends with a glossary containing very easy definitions, for example, a carnivore is “an animal that eats only meat.”

It’s definitely a beautiful book with a lot of data. And the author knows what he’s talking about: he’s been studying and excavating prehistoric life for 35 years.
You may have run into its traveling dinosaur museum or listened to his podcasts. If not, I recommend you visit his website DinosaurGeorge.com.

I was very surprised however not to find anything at all about the disappearance of these animals. I understand this a book for young readers, not a treatise in palaeontology. Still, as a kid, reading all these descriptions in the past tense, I would think, now wait a minute, why aren’t these around any longer What happened? Even saying that scientists are not totally sure why and how they disappeared would have been a nice way of making kids want to research more.

VERDICT: A beautiful book with a lot of data, though a couple of extra elements would have improved it.

In full compliance with FTC Guidelines, I received this book free of charge from the publisher through The Callisto Publisher’s Club. I was in no way compensated for this post as a reviewer, and the thoughts are my own.