Nobody has ever watched a T. rex eat.
That sentence is the whole difference between this book and the rest of the series sitting on our shelf, and it is why the note is worth reading before you spend the five dollars.
The format is the same as the rest of Sandra Markle's series. One body part to a spread, a cartoon of a child wearing it, a short paragraph on what it was for. A Velociraptor's hooked toe claw. T. rex teeth. Ankylosaurus armor. A Brachiosaurus neck. But in the others, the picture facing the cartoon is a photograph of a living animal doing the thing, and in this one it cannot be. There is no photograph. There never will be one.
The science it actually teaches
The dinosaur facts in here are the ordinary kind and your child has probably collected half of them already. The valuable thing in this book is not printed in it, and you have to put it there yourself.
Ask, on any spread, how would anybody know that. It is a real question with a real answer, and the answer is the actual working method of a whole science.
A tooth gets read as a tool. Its thickness, its curve, how deeply it is anchored, and whether the tip is worn smooth or snapped off all say something about the force the jaw made and what it was closing on. Bite marks left behind in other animals' fossil bones say what got bitten. The shape of a joint says which way a limb could and could not move, which is why the sickle claw on a Velociraptor's second toe is described so carefully and why what it was for is still argued about by people who have looked at more of them than you or I ever will. Armor says there was something worth defending against, and it does not say what. And a neck that long is never free, because blood has to be pushed all the way up it, which is one of the ways a body quietly sets a limit on its own size.
None of that reasoning is in the book. The conclusions are stated in the same confident voice the rest of the series uses for behavior somebody filmed. That is not dishonesty, it is just what a Level 2 reader is. It does mean the best material in the entire series is lying on the floor next to this book waiting for a parent to pick it up.
The child it lands with
Buy this one for the child who is reading alone and does not yet believe they can finish a nonfiction book. It is a Scholastic Reader at Level 2, which makes it shorter and easier than the others, and a six year old can get through it in one sitting and come out the far side having finished a real book about a real subject. That feeling is worth more at six than any fact in it.
The child who wants dinosaur facts is a different child, and for them this is a bad purchase. They will strip it in a day and they already knew most of it.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the T. rex spread and ask how anybody knows what those teeth were for. Then leave the silence alone long enough that your child has to have a go.
Most children point at the picture, because there is always a picture. Push past it. The picture is somebody's drawing. The person who drew it was looking at a skeleton, and the skeleton is the only thing anyone actually has.
Then hand over the method one piece at a time. The tooth is thick, so it did not snap when it hit something hard. The tip is worn, so it hit something hard often. There are marks the right shape and the right spacing on other animals' bones. Nobody watched any of it happen, and everybody who studies it agrees anyway, because several separate kinds of evidence point the same direction.
That is a solid ten minutes and it is worth more than every fact in the book put together. Somewhere in it your child works out on their own that there is a difference between knowing something because you saw it and knowing something because you reasoned it out, which is a line plenty of grown adults never draw.
What to know going in
Three things, and one of them costs us the sale.
It is a Level 2 reader and it is a thinner book than the rest of the series, at the same price. If you are buying it as another one of those, that is the trade and you should hear it from us first. What the money buys here is a reading level, not more content.
It ends on why the dinosaurs are not here any more, which is a mass extinction handed to a six year old in a couple of sentences. Most children take that in stride. A few do not sleep. You already know which one is in your house.
And dinosaur reconstruction moves a great deal faster than children's publishing does, so look at the pictures before you treat any of them as settled, particularly on feathers. The bare scaly Velociraptor of thirty years ago is not what the evidence supports now, and a short reader is not where an argument gets aired. If your copy shows one, that is a conversation rather than a defect, and it is one of the better ones you will get to have this year.
Where to get it
$4.99 for What If You Had T. Rex Teeth?, bought for the reading level rather than for the dinosaurs. It is the easiest thing on the Stealth Science shelf to hand a brand new reader and then walk out of the room. One timing note: if you can get to a museum with a mounted skeleton in it inside the next month, buy the book for the week before, because the question this whole note is built on lands very differently when your child is standing underneath the real bones.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
What If You Had Animal Eyes Is a Reader, Not a Picture Book
What If You Had Animal Eyes!? (Scholastic Reader, Level 2) by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Smithsonian 5-Minute Dinosaur Tales: An Honest Look
Smithsonian Kids: 5-Minute Dinosaur Tales by Editors of Silver Dolphin Books
Grade Pre-K to 2
Magic School Bus Dinosaurs: The Feather Problem
The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
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.
