By Barbara Kerley
The true story of the man who made the earliest life-size dinosaurs anyone had ever seen, back when nobody knew what they really looked like.
Long before dinosaurs were in every toy box, almost no one had any idea what they looked like. This is the true story of Waterhouse Hawkins, an artist in the 1800s who set out to build them full-size, out of iron and clay, so ordinary people could finally see them. He worked shoulder to shoulder with the scientists of his day, threw a famous dinner party inside a half-finished dinosaur, and then set off to build a whole dinosaur park in New York. That's where it all went wrong.
This is the stretch at the top of the trail, where dinosaurs stop being toys and become real science and real history. It's a true story about a person who was dinosaur-obsessed before that was even a thing, which is a mirror your child will recognize instantly. Brian Selznick's paintings are dramatic and gorgeous, it earned a Caldecott Honor, and it makes the point that the dinosaurs they love had to be figured out by somebody, from nothing but bones.