Dinosaur Hour! by Hitoshi Shioya – Review

There are over sixty different kinds of dinosaurs in this hilarious comic about dinosaurs gone goofy, wild, and just plain silly.  Each chapter is called a ‘bone’ and shows a variety of these creatures in funny situations.  When some Allosaurus try to attack a Brachiosaurus, the giant beast doesn’t even notice them and smacks them with his huge tail. Dinosaur children play tag and tell stories of a T-Rex ghost.  A group of dinos wait in line for ferns at lunch and decide to leave because the wait is too long, just like people would at a restaurant.  Bonehead dinosaurs – Pachycephalosaurus – bang each others’ heads together just for the fun of it.  Some Protoceratops try to imagine a Velociraptor with feathers, and end up thinking of a fluffy duckling.  A couple of Protoceratops run into a Tyrant-a-Saurus, which is what T-Rex was first called, and laugh at how people used to think the T-Rex looked.  They explain how thoughts about dinosaurs have changed, which is really interesting, and tell the Tyrant-a-Saurus how he should look and act.  There are some really cool dinosaurs in this book that I didn’t know about, like the Deinosuchus, a supersized crocodile. 

At the end of the book there are dino sumo wrestler paper figures to color, cut out, and play with.  This book was nominated for School Library Journal’s Best Comics for Kids in 2009 award – it didn’t win, but it is a winner with my kids and me.