Dig Those Dinosaurs

by Lori Haskins Houran, Francisca Marquez (Illustrator)

Overview

The rhythmical text and lively, well-researched illustrations follow a paleontologist and his crew as they find, clean, assemble, and exhibit dinosaur bones. The read-aloud fun is accompanied by up-to-date facts about dinosaur fossils. Educational and inspiring, this story is bound to captivate little scientists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807515785
Publisher:	Whitman, Albert & Company
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	24
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Lori Haskins Houran is the author of more than forty books, including Next to You and Space Mice. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Francisca Marquez is a Mexican-born illustrator currently living in South Africa. When not painting, Francisca enjoys hiking in the mountains and swimming in the sea. She shares her studio with her cat, Popsicle.

Editorial Reviews

PreS—Houran's rhyming text is just right for chanting (or singing along to the tune of "Skip to My Lou") at storytimes. As each stage of the process repeats ("Dig, dig, dig those dinosaurs" times three), young paleontologists carefully excavate dinosaur bones, assembling and displaying them in a museum. Two spreads are devoted to each of five verses. Marquez's pleasant illustrations portray the smiling crew members and museum visitors in soft, pastel shades. There is a major flaw, however; the triceratops skeletons are presented with their tails dragging on the ground, which is contrary to current scientific theory. Brief explanations of the five stages mentioned in the rhyme appear at the end of the book (where another dinosaur tail is correctly drawn). Librarians will have to weigh the book's child-appeal against the illustration mistake when deciding whether or not to purchase.—Martha Simpson, Stratford Library Association, CT

School Library Journal

New and preliterate readers will happily clap along to the incantatory rhythms of this primary-level call to "dig, dig, dig"--in both senses of the word--dino fossils. Using repetition and rhyme, Houran comments as paleontologists carefully excavate fossils from a site, wrap them up for shipment ("So big, big, big those dinosaurs / Big, big, big those dinosaurs…"), then lay them out in a museum lab ("Jig, jig, jigsaw dinosaurs"), to be assembled ("Rig, rig, rig…") into a display with painted backdrops and finally surrounded by a flood of admiring museumgoers. With simplified but reasonable accuracy, Marquez depicts each stage of the process in softly modeled, harmoniously colored scenes, and her crew of paleontologists is diverse in both ethnicity and gender (although, sadly, the crew supervisor is a bespectacled white man). Both author and illustrator digestibly expand on each step of the process in a closing spread. A rousing prelude to Aliki's more detailed dino discourses, tailor-made for reading aloud. (Informational picture book. 3-5)

Kirkus Reviews