School Library Journal Review

Gr 2-4-Here the covers open and tie back to reveal three scenes, each of which is a 3-D dino-diorama thickly populated with toothy predators and well-armored prey amid lush greenery. Rey's brightly hued, actively posed pop-up figures are also reproduced (though more fuzzily) in an accompanying booklet that fits securely into a pocket and itself opens to a standard two-dimensional overview of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods on land, along with glimpses of ocean dwellers and notes on dinosaur eggs, fossil formation, and mass extinctions. There is some chowing down but no actual gore in sight, and paper-engineer Williams creates an unusual effect by layering a sheet of clear acetate into one scene to represent the surface of a lake or stream. Eye-catching visuals compensate for the routine text.-John Peters, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.