A Day at the Dinosaur Museum is a popup book that makes for a relatively straightforward introduction to dinosaurs, but with the idea that the readers are wandering through a museum while learning about them. Tom Adams is listed as the author, and Josh Lewis is listed as the illustrator, though I am uncertain who had the main hand in designing the popups, pull tabs, and other action elements throughout the book.
In keeping with the main conceit, the book is divided into several “rooms” (though only a few are actually designed to look like rooms), which are arranged as follows:
- Room 1: dinosaur relationships
- Room 2: Mesozoic timeline and continental drift
- Room 3: intro to paleontology (dating, famous locales, The Bone Wars)
- Room 4: How Dinosaurs Lived (AKA paleobiology)
- Room 5: air & sea reptiles
- Room 6: End Cretaceous extinction
- Room 7: Dinosaurs Today – surprising lack of focus on the fact that birds are dinosaurs, instead using that as a more of a jumping off point to talk about de-extinction instead
The illustrations are serviceable, but there seems to be quite a few tracings of images of toys throughout the book. The infamous Papo Rex of course makes an appearance, not only in a “3D Model” flap as an actual T. rex, but also with ever-so-slight modifications to become an “Allosaurus” in the fourth room as well.
The feathered theropods fare poorly in the illustrations, as well. Archaeopteryx gets away with a decent look, but an otherwise-decent Oviraptor is given dromaeosaur feet, three other dinosaurs are given “feather sleeves”, and both appearances of Velociraptor are completely naked. Even the bird-dinosaur connection is weirdly almost side-stepped. One would think this would be a major topic on a page called “Dinosaurs Today”, but it’s mostly mentioned as a pretext for discussing the potential of the “Chickenosaurus” genetic experiment instead.
There’s a part of me that wants to like A Day at the Dinosaur Museum, but ultimately I can’t recommend it. The errors in illustration are enough to drop it out of the running for me, but something a little more fundamental nags me about the book as well. I feel it doesn’t really quite commit to its own premise of touring a museum, with at least three of the pages not looking like rooms at all, and many of the others feeling somewhat abstracted. If you can find it, I would recommend the vintage book Dinosaurium from 1993 as a far superior realization of this general concept. Note: the 1993 Dinosaurium is not to be confused with 2018’s Dinosaurium, which has even less of a museum vibe than A Day at the Dinosaur Museum. For the Dinosaurium I’m thinking of, you can check out the print review at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, or listen to their podcast episode about it.
With that, I’ll wrap up this rare negative review with some recommendations for better books I’ve written about previously. It’s been a while since I’ve had an excuse to mention Jason Chin’s Grand Canyon or I Am NOT a Dinosaur!, which are two of my favorite books I’ve reviewed, so give those a look if you haven’t yet! Since I mentioned Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, I’ll plug David & Jennie Orr’s Mammoth is Mopey, and while Unnatural Selection deserves a mention on its own merits, Chasmosaurs host Natee Himmapaan contributed their lovely handwriting to many of the figures, which is just an extra excuse to praise it. Thank you for reading, and hopefully I can find something approaching these in quality for my next review!
Dino Dad Reviews 