A long time ago there was dinosaurs. Big dinosaurs and small dinosaurs. Dinosaurs with horns on their heads or spikes down their backs. Dinosaurs with long, long necks and long, long tails.

Imaginatively and with a masterful use of color, shape and composition, Byron Barton brings to life unique and endearing vision of what the world may have looked like once upon a time.

There are three things just about every toddler gets excited about - anything that makes noise, being tickled, and dinosaurs. This book could essentially meet all three excitement factors...if you add sound effects and create a ticklesaurus. The pictures in "Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs" are child-like in their simplicity and large curves and are filled with bold primary colors. The color scheme gets silly sometimes, adding to the fun, with unusual colors for otherwise recognizable animals and scenes; the book begins with a purple triceratops and an orange kentrosaurus, and has a pink ground and yellow sky, which soon becomes a lime green ground and pink sky. There is one sentence per page, which always includes the word 'dinosaur' so little readers will learn to recognize it.

It is fun to try and spot the extra dinosaur on each page; the dinosaur being described is in the forefront, but if you look hard enough there is always a second dinosaur somewhere in the background. Your little one will likely have questions, such as where dinosaurs live now and, of course, if they can have one. You can also spend some time with your little one before or after the story studying the inside covers (front and back), as they show solid outlines of different dinosaurs with their names and a phonetic spelling next to them. This helps you when your child asks, "How do you say that one?"

I read this story to my three-year-old friend, Sam, as a bedtime story. It worked well because the last page ends with "very tired and very, very sleepy dinosaurs" -a mama triceratops and her babies going to sleep. Sam wanted to call the Diplodocus a 'giraffe' because of the long neck. He also said he wanted to be the Pachycephalosaurus - mostly because he thought the name was so long and funny sounding. He never could say it correctly - I don't think I did either! - so we agreed to call it the "P-saurus."

--Audra