School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Paying homage to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, and David Grann's The Lost City of Z (Doubleday, 2009), Dinosaurology mixes excellent information with an Edwardian-style story. As with other works in the series, interactive elements such as flaps, pull-outs, packets of glitter, and shiny relia add three-dimensional interest. The illustrations, both in full color and archival black and white, are appealing and informative. Presented as a journal documenting an expedition searching for a lost world in which dinosaurs still roam, the story includes maps, current scientific facts, and up-to-date particulars relating not only to the study of dinosaurs but also to the science of paleontology and the men and women who led the field in the discovery and study of those old bones. The fictional author pays tribute to Conan Doyle's work in both format and context, even slyly naming a dog after Conan Doyle's main character, and in the claim that the author appropriated the information from this journal as the basis for his Lost World. Colonel Percy H. Fawcett and his son, Jack, the primary characters in this version, were actual explorers of the Amazon, and their disappearance in the 1920s has remained an unsolved mystery. Readers interested in dinosaurs, exploration, and paleontology will enjoy the presentation of facts within the package; however, as stand-alone fiction the story is too simplistic for readers with the advanced skills necessary for comprehension. And few children would understand the many somewhat obscure references to the previous works.-Eva Elisabeth VonAncken, formerly at Trinity-Pawling School, Pawling, NY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
The biggest surprise in this addition to the popular, 10-year-old Ologies series is that it's taken this long for a dinosaur-themed entry to arrive. Framed as a journal of a 1907 expedition to the "Lost Island of Yannapalu," the book follows explorer Percy Fawcett and his assistant, Rimes, as they travel to South America to meet with the islanders, discover dinosaur fossils, and then the real thing: "The tales were true: here were living, breathing dinosaurs!" As in the rest of the Ologies books, booklets, flaps, and other interactive elements appear throughout (glitter is a stand-in for "finely ground dinosaur horn"), and the field journal motif provides an engrossing blend of fact and fiction. Ages 8-12. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
The real-life explorer Percy Fawcett's goal to find a lost city in South America is reimagined as an expedition to an island of living dinosaurs, told in a fictional-journal format that employs pull tabs, flaps, and embedded plastic "jewels" along with illustrations, maps, and photographs in early-twentieth-century style. Plentiful scientific facts are included, but they can be hard to sort from the book's fictitious elements. (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
The weakest entry in the 'Ology series (so far) is undersupplied with content, invention or even the customary embedded and detachable trinkets. Supposedly the record of a 1907 expedition that explores a South American island on which primitive humans coexist with dinosaurs, the yellowed "notebook" at first glance looks like others in the series. It features wordy, awed comments in a faux hand-lettered type squeezed into crowded spreads and gatefolds around dashed-off watercolors, small pencil sketches, and inset letters, booklets or info cards that are either pasted in or, more often, printed to look as if they were. Crowded around the edges and sometimes overlapping, the insets provide additional dino portraits, cursory infodumps of standard-issue dino data (as it was in 1907, with editorial updates in small print at the bottom) and brief profiles of prominent early paleontologists. The paltry assortment of "realia" consists of a notably unconvincing pouch of silver-glitter "ground dinosaur horn," a patch of plastic "Allosaurus skin" and four plastic "jewels." The overall premise and much of the plot should sound familiar to older readers, and indeed, at the end is a purported letter from Arthur Conan Doyle with an unapologetic admission that he stole them from this "document" for his novel The Lost World. The theft actually went the other way, and considering the uninspired result, to no worthy purpose. (Novelty. 10-13)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
