Tyrannosaurus rex – King of the Dinosaurs (Book Review)

One of our ambitions at Everything Dinosaur is to encourage young people to read about  dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.  We have spent quite a long time looking at various books to see if we would like to add them to our shop.   As we have run our focus groups and Hall tests we have asked young readers to give us their views on certain books.  After much research and deliberation the first set of books is now available and we can review it here.

Tyrannosaurus rex – King of the Dinosaurs is a colourful, pop-up book with illustrations from John Sibbick (a world renowned dinosaur illustrator).  The innovative pop-up design was well liked by our young testers who recommended that the book be rated as suitable for 5 years and upwards.  They liked the pull mechanisms in the book which revealed the T.rex skull structure and showed how the legs worked and such like.

The book also contains a pull-out cardboard model of a Tyrannosaurus which is about 60cm long – this went down really well with the young scientists.

As for the Mums and Dads, they liked the hard-book robust nature of the book itself and the way in which key words and concepts were explained along the way.

Everyone agreed that the illustrations were superb, a credit to John Sibbick no doubt, although some were a little puzzled as to why T. rex would have a blue and yellow back.  Why not?  Since colour does not fossilise it is hard to say what colour Tyrannosaurus rex, or any dinosaur for that matter might be.  The dappled skin could be useful to help break up the huge animal’s outline as it moved around in poor light conditions such as early dawn or through the shafts of light from a grove of southern beech trees.

Here is a link to the Everything Dinosaur website: Everything Dinosaur.

All in all a good book, worthwhile adding to junior’s collection.  However, one point noted by our dinosaur team – the actual title “Tyrannosaurus Rex” is not quite how scientists would write the name of T. rex.  In science, when it comes to classifying animals they have a genus name i.e. Tyrannosaurus and a species name in this case rex.  When these names are written down the genus name is always in capitals and the species name, rex is written in lower case.  It is not correct to put a capital R onto rex.

Being pedantic, you are supposed to write the species name in italics like this:

Tyrannosaurus rex but on many occasions this etiquette is ignored.  These things are important to us, even in dinosaur books for children, perhaps more so.