Tryannosaurus: The Amazing Wonders Collection »

The ideal gift for dinosaur connoisseurs! This insider’s account unearths the truth about major species — and features a fearsome ready-to-assemble 26-inch-long T. rex model inside.

Head out to the western U.S. in the early twentieth century, where an amateur paleontologist follows a famed T. rex discoverer and makes some extraordinary finds of his own. While uncovering carnivorous dinosaur fossils, he documents his observations in an elaborate journal featuring maps, charts, sketches, and richly rendered color illustrations. Surprisingly, he also comes to some prescient conclusions about the ways dinosaurs walked and used their tails — and their seemingly preposterous link to birds.

Children's Literature

Designed to look like a book, this is a 12" square box one inch deep with a paperback book tucked into the back of the front cover and a folder attached to the back cover holding enough slotted parts to make two dinosaur models. Other than a brief mention of making dinosaur models in the body of the text, there is no reference to the models and no directions are supplied for constructing them. The booklet itself is more confusing than educational. Instead of a straight forward presentation about T. Rex, this becomes a fabricated story of an Army veterinarian of 1907 who leaves the army to travel to Montana where he hears there has been a discovery of dinosaur bones. The book tells of his trip to Montana by train and is illustrated with a map showing that the train does not reach Montana. The text is further confused by being divided into meaningless chapters introduced by extremely difficult to read italic print. Some of the sketches of dinosaurs are explained in even more difficult to read italic script. With all the excellent material on the market about dinosaurs, this hodgepodge of a book has little to recommend it. Reviewer: Eleanor Heldrich