Drimmer, Stephanie Warren. How to Survive in the Age of Dinosaurs: A handy guide to dodging deadly predators, riding out mega-monsoons, and escaping other perils of the prehistoric age. Washington, DC: National Geographic Partners, 2023.

Guide to category: Kid Review – review of books for elementary-aged and younger children

Summary

Boom, boom, BOOM … Look out! That’s a T. rex coming your way!? You’ve been transported back in time to the age of the dinosaurs. What do you do?!

Test your chops and discover if you have what it takes to survive at a time when Earth looked, well, a tad different in this ultimate survival guide to the prehistoric age.

Find out how to make it through exploding volcanoes and mega monsoons—while dodging giant Permian bugs! See how to fend off an angry pterosaur and learn what to do if you’re caught in a stampede of enormous titanosaurs. Discover what you could eat (spoiler alert: You better like the taste of insects!), and find out which hungry creatures just might try to eat you!

Packed with tips, tricks, and helpful maps, this is the ultimate handbook for dinosaur fans who want to know what life on Earth was really like when dinos ruled. Could you survive in the age of dinosaurs? 

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My Kid Review

Most kids go through a phase when dinosaurs are all they can think about. In How to Survive  in the Age of Dinosaurs, Stephanie Drimmer looks at what it would take to live during the dinosaur period. 

Chapters include: Can you survive the age of dinosaurs? How to survive the world before dinosaurs. How to survive the Triassic. How to survive the Jurassic. and How to survive the dinosaur extinction. The book closes with a glossary and index which help make it a more useful resource. 

I was surprised by some of the dinosaurs included in this book. I went through a dinosaur period with three children as well as countless students and there were dinosaur names I had never heard of. The facts about the individual dinosaurs will be fascinating to the dinosaur-lover. 

The book states that it is rare to find a dinosaur track, yet there are at least 10 places in the United States where you can see dinosaur trackways.

As you might guess, author Stephanie Drimmer takes an old earth and evolutionary view with dinosaurs existing between 299 and 66 million years ago. 

Most of the pages are laid out in portrait format but there are some that flip to landscape. So readers will need to flip their book several times while reading. 

I’m not sure I would place How to Survive in the Age of Dinosaurs in a K-12 Christian school library. Much of the information presented as “fact” really is just speculation since no person made a written record during that time. The evolutionary aspect of the book will not fit with the beliefs of most Christian schools.

I received a complimentary copy of How to Survive in the Age of Dinosaurs. This is my honest review.