Procynosuchus Anyone?

Dinosaurs and primeval creatures continue to enchant young readers

By Kathleen Baxter -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2004

Ever noticed how small children can reel off the most complicated dinosaur names? Prehistoric creatures, safely lurking in the past, retain their power to delight readers of all ages and no library ever has enough books on the topic.

With scientific knowledge growing rapidly, readers can barely keep up. Kids in grades 4–7 will thrill to Shelley Tanaka's New Dinos: The Latest Finds! The Coolest Dinosaur Discoveries! (Atheneum, 2003) and discover that a new dinosaur fossil—from a previously unknown creature—is unearthed every seven weeks somewhere around the world. Paleontologists believe that we have only discovered one percent of all the dinosaurs that ever existed.

The Sahara Desert in Africa is a Jurassic lover's dream, full of fossilized dinosaurs, but the region is so huge, remote, and hot that much of it remains unexplored by dinosaur hunters, who are all on a quest to find the world's largest creature. Contenders for biggest carnivore are Gigantosaurus, which chomped its prey and then stood back and watched it bleed to death, and Tyrannosaurus rex, whose bite could easily crush a pickup truck—a whomping 3,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.

Christopher Sloan weighs in on the debate with SuperCroc: And the Origin of Crocodiles (National Geographic, 2002) and says that T. Rex probably fought it out with the ancestors of the modern crocodile. "SuperCroc" was twice as long and many times heavier than any crocodile alive today—one fossil dug up in the Sahara stretched 36 feet!

Crocs were efficient eating machines that often fought dinosaurs and won. While the crocodile's body has grown considerably smaller over the years, not much else of its physical appearance has changed. Even now it has an amazing bite—2,000 pounds per square inch and people are a bigger threat than dinosaurs ever were, which has made the croc an endangered species.

Kelly Milner Halls's Dinosaur Mummies: Beyond Bare-Bone Fossils (Darby Creek, 2003) sheds light on the most unusual fossils—dinosaur body parts, not skeletons. A fossil, Halls tells us, helps us to "see the past."

Dinosaur mummies are different from human mummies; their parts have been mineralized and turned to stone. Scientists theorize that the dinosaur's soft tissue, such as skin, muscle, and internal organs, turned to leather before the body decomposed. This slowed down the process of decay, and helped preserve the body parts for us to study today.

One of the rarest fossils ever found comes from a juvenile duck-billed dinosaur nicknamed Leonardo. The Brachylophosaur is 77 million years old and 23 feet long. More than 70 percent of its soft tissue is preserved and scientists can even tell what Leonardo ate for his last meal.

Don't be surprised if your booktalk listeners know what creatures came before dinosaurs. If you need to bone up on the subject yourself, Hannah Bonner describes the primeval Permian Age in When Bugs Were Big, Plants Were Strange, and Tetrapods Stalked the Earth: A Cartoon Prehistory of Life Before Dinosaurs (National Geographic, 2004). The Arthorpleura, an ancient centipede, was six feet long. Permian dragonflies had a wingspan of 28 inches while Hibbertopterus, a relative of the scorpion, was bigger than a Labrador retriever. A great illustration by Bonner shows the relative sizes of these monsters next to a modern-day sunbather on the beach.

The pre-dino landscape was similarly bizarre. Full-grown trees looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book and in the oozy swamps, animals were developing in completely new ways. Amphibians laid their eggs on land instead of water, for the first time, and these new eggs consisted of water inside the shell. Another crucial development was the dog-like Procynosuchus that could breathe and chew at the same time, something that no animal had done before.

While giants may no longer walk the Earth, sauropods, meat eaters, and prehistoric insects now hunt and battle their way through glossaries, sidebars, and full-color illustrations. The wild world continues to mesmerize. Grab these terrific books and watch them capture your audience faster than a pouncing Masiakasaurus!