As a former geologist I’m overly sensitive to intimations that dinosaurs and people overlapped. I have this fear that when kids read books featuring children who find a newly hatched dinosaur or dinosaurs who give their human parents goodnight kisses, they’ll start buying into the idea that the dinosaurs went extinct because humans didn’t invite them onto the Ark. The fact that no person has ever seen a living dinosaur means that any books featuring the two species have to somehow convey a sense of fantasy, which can be tricky when you’re writing for toddlers.
“If the Dinosaurs Came Back” makes it very clear that the dinosaurs are no longer with us while reading (happily) like a brainstorming session amongst 6-year old dinosaur enthusiasts. Each page features a different task that a dinosaur could perform if they made a comeback: Taking the place of ladders for painters, giving dentists a whole lot of teeth to take care of, keeping the grass short, etc. It’s a potentially great way to convey their scale, and some of the scenarios do this well: A dinosaur could, for instance, give people rides to work. But it’s misleading to suggest that dinosaurs were as tall as mountains, thus giving mountain climbers new mountains to climb. And it’s doubly inaccurate to suggest that dinosaurs could push rainclouds away so that the sun shines all the time. But it’s a fantasy, right?
Our favorite part of the book is the key in the back, which shows a couple dozen dinosaurs and lists their names. We frequently skip right to it so we can “talk about all dinosaurs,” and I’m planning to photocopy it before returning it to the library. Any misgivings I have about the human-dinosaur interactions or the errors in scale are more than made up for by this key. It’s unbelievably adorable to hear Zadie rattling off names like corythosaurus and diplodocus, and I’m grateful to be learning learning along with her.
We’re in full-on dinosaur obsession mode here and I’d love to find a few good dinosaur books. If you have any suggestions please leave them in the comments.
