Rhinos In Nebraska, fab non-fiction storytelling for mid-elementary and up

Rhinos In Nebraska is an absurd title for a book. Nebraska is known for its picturesque plains and farmland. A book claiming to have Rhinos In Nebraska is as fanciful as flying cars or low-calorie food that tastes as good as the full-calorie version, isn’t it?  However, back up the calendar a hundred million years to the end of the Mesozoic period, reframe the title and the fiction that you thought it was, is now plausible. This is the story of the Ashfall Fossil Beds, a place that’s now on my bucket list. Beyond that, Rhinos In Nebraska is a book that will leave elementary and middle school readers hanging on every well-written word.

The book is written by Alison Pearce Stevens and has a style that is perfect for young readers. It’s inquisitive and is obviously telling a non-fiction story, yet it’s done as if we’re reading about a mystery. At times, Rhinos In Nebraska felt like I was taking part in a real-life version of Clue or a really cool trip with my friends. You know the way that a very engaging documentary on Nat Geo or Disney + is? Everyone involved knows the answers, but they establish the story in such a way that audiences don’t know how it’s going to get there.

Rhinos In Nebraska quickly does away with the impossible and places readers in a grassy plain with rhinos, zebra-like creatures, and some strange elephant with four tusks. Your mind’s eye will take you to a cantina in Star Wars where Han solo most certainly shot first. This is a prehistoric locale is instead, it’s Nebraska, but get those images of Bruce Springsteen’s sleepy LP out of your head.

This is just before a supervolcano that’s located west of the area is about to explode, which will kill millions of animals. Fast forward to modern times, well, in the early 1950s and Donald Peterson finds a partial rhino skull.  One would think that finding a rhino skull in a place that’s thousands of miles where they live is big news. However, bone hunters had been in that region for decades, so finding a better than average dinosaur bone was just a great day at the (dusty) office.

Let’s go forward 20 years from that period and scientists started to do larger and more precise digs. The more that they dug; they realized that this area in Nebraska was crawling with intact skeletons from a wide variety of dinosaurs. It was more than just a hot spot, this was an area that dozens, upon dozens of animals died at the same time.

Alas, they did not find this out overnight. It wasn’t until decades later when the area was named, federally protected, funded and a facility was built that could allow visitors to see the enormity of this discovery. I found it impressive that the Ashfall Fossil Beds is an open-air museum, with paleontologists still digging into the ground today.

Young readers will love Rhinos In Nebraska because of the narrative, question-and-answer flow of the book. It feeds on the natural curiosity that everybody has about anything that’s buried for a long period of time. Kids also love to ask, “Is this real”? Because this is real, and that the book is written at a level that ages nine and up will be able to digest it makes this a home run.  It’s the best way to get kids to read a genre, non-fiction, that they typically run away from. The book lists lots of things that really happened. However, it’s presented like a Sherlock mystery, with elements of humor, self-awareness, and intelligence that young readers will appreciate.

Rhinos In Nebraska, The Amazing Discovery of the Ashfall Fossil Beds is by Alison Pearce Stevens with illustrations by Matt Huynh and available on Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.

There are affiliate links in this post.