Prehistoric Pets, a data-heavy dino pop-up, in a good way

If there’s one thing that Jurassic Park taught us it’s that chicken-sized dinosaurs, even if they had feathers, were vicious creatures that did not play around and could kill you in a number of different ways. Prehistoric Pets takes that idea, puts it into a pop-up book, and creates a colorful, read-to-me book that will entice readers aged five and up.

It’s important to point out that Prehistoric Pets is a pop-up book that will work best with middle elementary students or be used as a book that has a guide. There are lots of younger dinosaur fans who might want to look at the book by themselves, but the 3-D elements won’t stand up too much to their younger hands.  The dinosaurs pop up off of the page while their modern version looks at them from the opposing page. In-between the two there are nuggets or paragraphs of information, in addition to illustrations of other examples or close-ups of certain physical adaptations that have happened through the years.

For example, the dog has come a long way baby. Back in the day, they were epicyon, and while they had many of the elements that make up Spot or Fido today, the strength of their jaws and propensity to eat more than they love would not have made them ideal pets for Sam the caveman. However, something happened around 20,000 years ago and our four-legged friends started to relax and warmed up to retrieving balls.

The same thing happened for sifrhippus, who became the horse about 56 million years ago. And not to be left out, the cat has evolved from smilodon, albeit most of them were cousins to their larger, Savannah-loving predators.

Prehistoric Pets is a gorgeous book that pre-k through elementary will love. The reason for the big age range is that the text in the book is on par for most fifth-graders to read by themselves. Those ages will also be able to responsibly interact with the pop-up elements and not rip them off of their pages. While the pages are thicker than the average bear, they are not board book thickness. They are more like thick poster board, and while the pop-ups are also on that thick paper, they’re at the mercy of uncoordinated early elementary students. The spine of the book is in that same category. It’s not as thick as board book spines and therefore won’t sustain much aggressive use (reading) from the key dinosaur demographic of five years old.

It’s obvious that the book is well researched and is thick with written details. If your third, fourth or fifth-grader is doing a report on dinosaurs, animals, pets or evolution this will be a nice resource for them to use as a reference. At $17.99 retail, the price is quite fair when one takes into account the information presented in the format as it stands. This is a high-level information pop-up book that younger kids will like to have read to them. It’s also a nice reference book for those elementary-aged kids who like some nice graphics to go with the content that they’re going to put into their paper.

Prehistoric Pets is by Dr. Dean Loman with illustrations by Mike Love and available on Templar Books, an imprint of Candlewick Press.

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