Terrific Timelines Dinosaurs Review

We were very excited to receive the Terrific Timelines: Dinosaurs by Richard Ferguson and Isabel Thomas with illustrations by Aude Van Ryn to review. Both my children love dinosaurs and often are wearing t-shirts with dinosaurs from the Jurassic era. My daughter's favourite dinosaur is the Tyrannosaurus Rex (T-Rex) with its big teeth and little arms.

Even though they love dinosaurs, I must admit that we don't really don't know the facts about dinosaurs and even that there was several eras of dinosaurs. This fascinating book features 20 dinosaurs from the from all three prehistoric eras: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. Each dinosaur has it own fact file.


The books start out with information on all three eras. The book explains what earth was like during the different prehistoric eras and how the dinosaurs kept evolving to adapt to environment changes and evolution of predators. We learned that the first dinosaurs were small and two-legged with bird-hipped pelvis but then evolution created lizard-hipped dinosaurs. The saurischians (lizard-hipped dinosaurs) that kept getting bigger to evolve into the giant four-legged herbivores, such as stegosaurus. I really enjoyed reading about the different eras to my daughter and trying to imagine what earth and the dinosaurs where like millions of years ago.

There is a factfile page dedicated to each of the 20 dinosaurs that are featured. Each dedicated page includes information on where and when fossils were found of the dinosaur. Based on the fossils, scientists have made conclusions about how the dinosaur survived predators, about the physical characteristics and diet. As more fossils are found, it will be interesting to learn more about these dinosaurs and if the previous conclusions are correct.


Once we finished reading all the interesting information about these dinosaurs, it is time to create the dino display. We very carefully press-out the dinosaurs and followed the instructions in the back of the book. It did require some very careful touch not to rip the dinosaurs. My six-year did find it a little challenging to get the dinosaurs to stand properly in the stand but just need a little bit of help from me. Laurence King Publishing recommend the ages of 7-11 for this book and this probably an appropriate range for the dino display process.


My daughter and I really enjoyed this book because it was filled with interesting new information but also the process to work together to create the dino display. I would recommend this book for your dinosaur-loving children. It is book that every child and parent will learn something new from and encourage their curiosity about dinosaurs.