Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus never met. There is more time between those two animals than between Tyrannosaurus and your kitchen table, and nearly every child, and most adults, have them wading around the same swamp on the same afternoon. Sorting that out is worth a book by itself.
The classroom is done up as Dinosaur Land, which is not enough for Ms. Frizzle, so the bus turns into a time machine and the class goes back to look at the animals in place. Joanna Cole wrote it and Bruce Degen drew it. It is a picture book, and like the rest of the series it runs three streams down every page: the story, the speech balloons, and hand-lettered notes taped round the margins carrying the facts.
The frame is a time machine. What is underneath it is a fossil dig, and the question it keeps answering is not what a dinosaur was. It is how anybody could possibly know.
The science it actually teaches
This is why it is on our Stealth Science shelf, and the reason is not dinosaurs. Plenty of books have dinosaurs. This one keeps showing your child where the information came from.
Start with what a fossil is, because most children have it wrong and so do most adults. A fossil is not a bone. It is a copy of a bone, made when minerals move into the space a bone was in, over a stretch of time nobody has a feel for. The thing standing in a museum hall is mostly rock in the shape of an animal. That is the first honest sentence a dinosaur book can hand over and this one hands it over early.
Teeth are the clearest lesson in it. You do not need to have watched an animal eat to know what it ate. Flat grinding surfaces mean plants. Blades and points mean meat. A jaw is evidence about a diet, and a child who works that out on a dinosaur will be doing it to the cat by Thursday.
The nests are the strongest one. The class turns up at a Maiasaura nesting ground, and that is not scenery. Nesting grounds with young animals still in the nests are the reason anybody says some dinosaurs tended their eggs and looked after their young. Nobody watched it happen. It was read off the ground. Point at that page and say so out loud.
Then the layered rock, which is a calendar. Deeper is older. Which animals turn up in which layer is how anyone knows which ones shared a world, and it is how anyone knows that the answer is usually no. That is where the one-big-swamp picture comes apart, and the useful thing is that it comes apart for a reason your child can follow rather than because a grown-up said so.
There is a fifth lesson in here that Joanna Cole did not put there on purpose, and it is the best one in the book. It is down in the caution, because it is also the thing you have to handle.
The child it lands with
This one has a wider useful range than the rest of the series, and the subject is doing the work. A five year old who cannot read a word of it will sit through the pictures because they are dinosaurs. A ten year old who has decided picture books are beneath him will read every taped-on note because they are dinosaurs.
The child it lands hardest with is the one who already has forty names memorised and is starting to be bored by the poster on the wall. That child does not need another list. That child needs to be told that all of it was worked out from stone, by people who never saw the animal, and this is where that starts.
One place to stop and talk
The best question in this book is not about a dinosaur. Open to any full-colour animal on any page and ask where the colour came from.
It did not come from a fossil. Skin colour is almost never something rock keeps, and for most of these animals the greens and browns and stripes are an artist making a reasonable guess so the page is not blank. That is not a lie and it is not sloppy work. It is a decision, and your child can be taught to see it being made.
Now do the opposite case, so the lesson does not curdle into everything is made up. The teeth are not a guess. The nest is not a guess. The size is not a guess. Those came off the fossil and would come off the fossil again if somebody dug up a second one tomorrow. What you are teaching, in about four minutes with one page open, is that a picture of a dinosaur is two things laid on top of each other: the part that was read off the evidence and the part that was filled in. Once a child can sort a page that way, they can do it to a museum, a documentary, and eventually a news story, and that skill is worth more than the entire Mesozoic.
One warning about running this. Some children hear the colour thing and decide the scientists do not really know anything. That is the wrong lesson and it is easy to head off. Not knowing the colour is not the same as not knowing the animal, and being clear about which part is which is the actual job.
What to know going in
This book was drawn in the 1990s, and the dinosaurs have changed since.
That sounds like a small thing and it is not. The biggest shift in dinosaur science in living memory arrived after this book was already on shelves. Fossils came out of the ground showing that a great many of the two-legged meat-eaters, including close relatives of the famous ones, carried feathers. Not scales. Feathers. The bare, pebbly, lizard-skinned predator of nineties artwork is out of date, and any child who has watched a recent dinosaur documentary already knows it.
The publisher says the re-released paperback carries updated scientific information, and the description does not say how far that reached into the artwork. So look before you hand it over. Find the small meat-eaters and see whether anything on them looks fuzzy. It takes a minute and then you know which conversation you are about to have.
Either way, do not correct the book as you read it. Date it instead. Before you open the cover, say that this is what the best people thought when it was drawn, and that some of it has since been shown to be wrong by other people digging up new rock. Do that and the out-of-date pictures stop being a defect and start being the demonstration. Science changed its mind because the evidence changed. Your child gets to watch that happen inside one book, which is not a thing you can arrange on purpose.
Two smaller ones. This is a book about animals that are all gone, so extinction is on the page, and for a lot of children this is where the idea first lands that an entire kind of living thing can stop. Some find that thrilling and some find it heavy, and you already know which one you have. And the store bands it grades 2 to 5, which is right about the words and optimistic about the content. A second grader can read the sentences. Millions of years does not mean anything at all to a second grader, and it is going to need saying more than once.
Where to get it
It is $8.99 at The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs, and I would buy it alongside a second dinosaur book printed in the last ten years, from anywhere, your library included. Put a week between them and let your child find the differences. One will have feathers and one will not, and the argument that starts between those two books teaches more about how science actually works than either of them manages alone. The Stealth Science shelf holds the rest of what we have read and kept, but for this title the second book matters more than the shelf does.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
A Beehive Is a City: The Magic School Bus Inside One
The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor: Life Without Sun
The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
T. Rex Teeth: How Anyone Knows What a Dinosaur Bit
What If You Had T. Rex Teeth?: And Other Dinosaur Parts (Scholastic Reader, Level 2) by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
