Starving for dinosaur knowledge? In Dining with Dinosaurs, award-winning author Hannah Bonner serves up a full course meal of mouthwatering Mesozoic food facts. Young readers will meet the “vores”: carnivores, piscivores, herbivores, insectivores, “trashivores,” “sunivores,” and “dinovores” and will most certainly be amazed, surprised and maybe even a bit grossed out when they learn what was on the prehistoric menu.
In addition to Hannah’s whimsical drawings, the book also features “Ask a Scientist” vignettes, a glossary, a listing of correct pronunciations of the trickier words in the book and even a trip to the “GROSSERY” store.
My Review
Though this book is recommended for children ages 7-10, children of all ages are going to love it! Dining with Dinosaurs tells you all about who and what ate who and what! There are the carnivores, insectivores, herbivores, piscivores, sunivores, and trashivores. Okay those last two are made up names, but they do describe what they ate.
Each “vore” is described in a fun and factual way. The book even includes “Ask a Scientist” sections where the scientists are actual scientists that are sharing facts! The book has awesome illustrations that help bring any technical terms down to a child’s level of understanding.
There is a food web and photosynthesis section in the book too. Plus, if you want to know who eats who and what today, the author includes it as well. You and your child will love reading this together! Dinosaurs are cool and the facts in this book are awesome! This is a must read for dino lovers!
About the Author
I grew up on the Spanish island of Mallorca, in an American household. As a child I loved to draw, and I loved nature. I raised baby sparrows that had fallen out of their nest, kept mosquito larvae in a jar in order to watch them hatch, and drew things I saw under the microscope.
An English friend and I set up a Natural History museum in the wood shed where we displayed bones, fossils and shells we’d found (to say nothing of the skull of my pet hamster, which in the name of science I had dug up a year or two after it died).
When I was a senior in high school, my father wrote a book about the plants of Mallorca, and I did pen-and-ink drawings to go with it. This was my first illustration job.
In college I majored in art, but continued to be interested in biology. I went on to illustrate all sorts of things: first grade readers, folk tales, classroom materials for the science show Nova, a children’s science dictionary (the Scholastic Science Dictionary, 2000), books about local mammals and birds, and more. I became especially interested in paleontology when a paleontologist friend of mine asked me to create a reconstruction of a prehistoric goat.
HANNAH BONNER’s natural illustrations have graced many publications including the best-selling Scholastic Science Dictionary and three award-winning National Geographic Kids titles, including When Bugs Were Big, Plants Were Strange, and Tetrapods Stalked the Earth, a Booklist Top 10 Science Book for Youth and included in the New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing.
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