Dinosaurs Can Be Small: A Kid’s Illustrated Book

If you were paying attention, we learned (or were reminded) that birds are descendants of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs Can Be Small is an illustrated book that dinosaur kids need. Those hard dinosaur kids, like the younger brother in Mitchell Vs. The Machines, that kid. If your child or students salivate at the thought of reading or having read to them, descriptions of giant lizards who died out so that the smallest of their brethren could survive, this is for you. This illustrated book sets up the smaller, lesser-known versions by introducing their more well-known, larger versions first. The result is a very curious dinosaur book that will entice dino-kids who think they know it all because they saw Jurassic Park for the dinosaur facts, and not the fact that they run amuck.

Even the cover of Dinosaurs Can Be Small will pique the attention of carpet time readers. You see the front foot of a Brontosaurus, with two much smaller dinosaurs standing beside it. Those two dinosaurs, who we later learn are a Microceratus and a Micropachycephalosaurus, barely come up to the big guy’s shin based on the illustration. When readers get to the meat of the book they’ll realize that this scale is very close.

I remember the dome-headed dinosaur that looks like it’s wearing a think football helmet on its head. Between that, the spikes that go around its ‘helmet’, and the spikes that go down its spine to the base of the tail this is truly the stuff of big lizard nightmare fuel. This lizard’s small friend also has a dome head. Sizing in at only 16 inches tall, it’s 22% the size of that critter but makes up for its name because the Micropachycephalosaurus has the longest name of any dinosaur.

Let’s think about what kids really want from dinosaurs. They want the massive 33 foot wingspan of the Quetzalcoatlus, who is a member of the pterosaur family, who technically isn’t a dinosaur. However, don’t tell the 10-year-old version of me who watched the cult favorite film Quetzalcoatl and loved every cheesy minute of it. Q, or Quetzalcoatlus lived at the same time as dinosaurs and had a much smaller family member called a Nemicolopterus that was just under one foot, tip to tip. I imagine Q soaring through the skies, probably laughing at its gravity-born lizard friends and watching its much smaller relative peck through the trees with ease.

Any kid that’s seen any of the Jurassic movies will see one of their favorites from those films in this book. Yeah, the latter films were rated PG-13 and dinosaur books see their audience extinct at around nine years old, but there are edited versions online, as well as snippets that those older elementary kids see. Remember that really big fish that jumped out of the water just before Jimmy Buffet’s scene in whatever Jurassic film? That big fish was Shonisaurus, a 50-foot long beast whose massive snout had a row of teeth longer the crew at the University of Washington. The Mixosaurus was just three feet long, but was essentially a scaled-down version of its non-dinosaur marine reptile pedigree; whose name made it a natural pseudonym to work at Margaritaville.  

At what age do dinosaurs stop being fun? When our children aged out of dinosaurs I kept all of their plastic figurines, or dinosaur action figures, whatever you want to call them. I kept them because there were so many of them and they were so much fun to play with them, when the audience was willing, that I couldn’t part with that memory. Maybe I read What The Dinosaurs Night Did Last one too many times. It could’ve been that, at one point I knew lots about those big lizards or descendants of big lizards that are currently nesting outside of our deck and look forward to our children’s rekindled interest in them. I could just be a pack rat, unwilling to part with things, regardless of how trivial they may seem, because of the memories they brought me.

Dinosaurs Can Be Small is a fun illustrated book. It highlights seven dinosaurs and their avian counterparts who survived the massive strike 66 million years ago. The book is fun to look at, with colors that run from corner to corner. It’s also educational in a manner that’s attractive to fans of the genres and those reluctant story-time kids who appear to be there under duress, but are really just tired or are looking for attention. Pre-K through second grade teachers, this is the stuff of gold if you’re looking for funny, STEM reading that will hold their attention just long enough for questions and answers that you can handle while you wait for the car pool line to be announced.

Dinosaurs Can Be Small is by Darrin Lunde with illustrations by Ariel Landy and available on Charlesbridge Publishing.

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