By Don Lessem
The giant dinosaur encyclopedia a fact-hungry child will disappear into for hours at a time.
This is the big one, nearly three hundred pages and more than six hundred dinosaurs, from the ones every child can already name to species dug up only recently. Each dinosaur gets a realistic painting, a guide to saying its name, and the facts: when it lived, what it ate, how it behaved. There's a dinosaur family tree, a dictionary of dino words, and notes from paleontologists who actually dig these things up. It isn't a book you read front to back. It's one your child dives into and surfaces from an hour later.
Your child has moved past 'I like dinosaurs' into 'I need to know everything about dinosaurs,' and this is the reference they'll pore over for years. It's written by a real paleontologist, so the facts are the good stuff, and it's built for browsing, whether they're looking up the one they saw on a show, following the family tree, or just flipping until something grabs them. It grows with them, from you reading entries aloud now to them reading them alone later.