Life was simple before the Jurassic Park movies came out because back then, parents and kids were on the same wavelength. Now school-going kids know more about extinct mammals than their parents or their grandparents, and had no one to answer their dinosaur questions, until now. Thankfully, Chris Ferrie’s book My First 100 Dinosaur Words plays that consultant role well and helps young readers like you not only validate whatever dinosaur thingy you might have stumbled upon, but also take you one step further.

Written by Chris Ferrie and illustrated by Lindsay Dale-Scott, this book is all about dinosaurs and their different species, the period they were found in and the different kinds of stuff they ate to live another day. Thankfully, it doesn’t cover the details of why dinosaurs went extinct, how they would have survived in today’s world, etc., because for one, it’s a kid’s book and it has been discussed before.

Since My First 100 Dinosaur Words has been written and illustrated for children, it is not as scary as the dinosaur movies out there. The bonus element here is that you will not find boring text on these pages, because the illustrations and captions are enough to make you understand the narrative. Despite the childish pictures, the best thing about this book is that it covers all kinds of dinosaurs that walked the earth, and what made them ‘stand out’ from the others.

It kicks off with the Mesozoic Era and then takes the story forward with different kinds of dinosaurs, including the tallest one named sauroposeidon, the longest one called supersauros, and of course, the largest one known as tyrannosaurus rex (T Rex). You will also come across the smallest dinosaur aptly named microraptor and discover what coprolite is.

The good stuff doesn’t just end there as you find out that while some dinosaur species could swim, some could fly making them the king of land, air, and sea simultaneously. These pages not only tackle the different kinds of dinosaurs, but also the different parts of their bodies and how some used their tails, their heads and their spikes to defend themselves.

This book also rubbishes the notion that all dinosaurs loved to eat other animals; some were herbivorous and ate plants, another group was piscivorous, meaning they lived on fish, while a few were insectivores, eating small insects. If you find information like this interesting, then you might consider a career in paleontology, which is the science of fossil organisms and related remains.

Lastly, what makes this book a lot more interesting is that it does take the readers seriously; had the writer-illustrator not done that, the book might have come across as just another collection tapping the dinosaur craze, but it doesn’t. In fact, it makes learning about dinosaurs more fun, even though some of the names are unpronounceable to elders even today.

Published in Dawn, Young World, November 11th, 2023