Everything anybody knows about Tyrannosaurus rex is a deduction. Nobody watched one hunt. Nobody watched one raise young, or lose a fight, or die. The whole animal has been reconstructed out of rock by people arguing carefully with each other, and that is a stranger and more useful idea than any dinosaur fact.
The book is number seven in the series, and it takes Teddy Fitzroy off the zoo grounds. He is out at his friend Sage's family ranch for a campout when the news arrives. The skull of a rare dinosaur, being dug out of that ranch in secret, has gone missing overnight in a rainstorm. It weighed five hundred pounds. There is not a footprint anywhere. A T. rex skull can sell for millions of dollars, and because the dig was a secret the police think it has to be somebody who already knew about it, which makes everyone a suspect, including the man who owns FunJungle. Running beside that, Teddy's girlfriend Summer is chasing the local black market in reptiles, which surfaced when a pair of twins bought an anaconda they had no business owning.
The science it actually teaches
This is the odd one in the series, and the reason is simple. Every other FunJungle book is about living animals, and a living animal can be watched. This one is about an animal nobody will ever watch. That changes the evidence completely, and it is the most valuable thing in the book.
Spell the difference out to your child once and it sticks.
When a keeper says a koala rests twenty hours a day, somebody sat there with a clock. When a paleontologist says a T. rex bit with a certain force, or moved at a certain speed, or carried its tail clear of the ground, nobody timed anything. That claim was built out of bone shape, the scars where muscle attached, physics, and comparison with animals that are alive now. It is a model. Models are strong, they are testable, and they get revised, which is why the dinosaur in your child's newest book does not stand the way the one in your childhood books stood.
Then there is the part that makes this theft a scientific crime and not only an expensive one. A fossil's information is not all inside the bone. It is in which rock layer the bone sat in, how it was lying, what else was in that layer, what the surrounding rock is made of. Take the skull away from the site and most of the meaning goes with it. That is why real digs are slow to the point of absurdity: bones are mapped and photographed and wrapped in plaster jackets before anything moves. And it is exactly why five hundred pounds of skull leaving overnight, in the rain, without a track, is the impossible thing at the centre of the story.
The money is real as well. In the United States a fossil found on private land generally belongs to whoever owns the land, which is why a ranching family can be sitting on a fortune in a hillside, why commercial fossil hunting exists at all, and why a museum sometimes finds itself bidding against a private collector for a specimen. That one legal fact is the engine of the entire plot.
The anaconda thread is not filler either. An anaconda is a constrictor, not a venomous snake. It kills by squeezing hard enough to stop blood moving, and the manageable little one somebody buys does not stay manageable or little. Reptiles bought by people who cannot house them get released, and in the warm parts of the country some released species have bred and stayed, which is a live ecological problem rather than a hypothetical one.
So: two markets in one book, fossils and live reptiles, both turning on the same question of what a person is allowed to own and how anybody proves where a thing came from.
Now the honest measure. This carries the most real science of the FunJungle books I would put in front of a child, and it is still a mystery first. Reckon on a page of science for several pages of suspects. That is the bargain the whole series makes, and it is why children finish these books instead of abandoning them.
The child it lands with
The dinosaur phase does not end for some children. It gets more specific.
This is for the ten year old who has aged out of dinosaur picture books, will not sit still for a reference book, and has started asking the dangerous question: how does anybody know that? A story that hands them a stolen skull and then makes them think about evidence is answering that question sideways, which is the only way it ever gets answered at this age.
There is a second child here too, and it is the one who has quietly decided that science is a list of things to memorise. Nothing in this book is memorisable. It is all argument.
One place to stop and talk
This one earns more than a single question, so give it ten minutes.
Pick any statement in the book about how the dinosaur lived. What it ate, how it moved, how big it grew. Then work backwards out loud. What would somebody have to have physically found for that to be knowable? A tooth with a particular pattern of wear. A bone with a healed break in it. A footprint pressed into what used to be mud. Stomach contents turned to stone. If the two of you cannot name the object, the statement is a guess wearing a lab coat, and it is entirely fine to say so out loud about a real scientist.
Then turn it around, because the book already has. The detectives are standing at a dig site in the rain reasoning from tracks that are not there. That is the same skill pointed at a different problem. Your child is doing paleontology on a crime scene without noticing, and if you name it for them once, they will notice it forever.
What to know going in
Gibbs puts children in real danger, and the adults threatening them have weapons and intent. This is not cartoon peril, and the tension in the last third is genuine.
The crude comedy is the house style of the series and it is here in full: bodily functions, animals behaving disgustingly, jokes aimed straight at a nine year old's sense of humour. Some parents find that is the reason their child reads at all. Some find it wearing by book three. Worth knowing which you are before you buy seven of them.
There is a very large constrictor loose around children, played for laughs and for fright at the same time, and there is an animal welfare thread about creatures being kept badly by people who should never have had them.
One practical thing. This is a late book. The mystery stands alone and your child will not be lost, but the cast walks in fully formed, girlfriend included, and the book does not stop to introduce anybody.
Where to get it
Tyrannosaurus Wrecks is $8.99 in paperback here, alongside the rest of the Stealth Science shelf.
Buying advice specific to this one. It is the only FunJungle book whose subject is not a living animal, which makes it the odd fit in the series and the right fit for one particular house. If yours is in a dinosaur year, this is the book that outlasts the phase, because what it actually teaches is not the animal. It is how anybody knows.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Curious World of Calpurnia Tate: Wild Is Not a Pet
The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Julie of the Wolves: The Science and the Caution
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
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.
