posted on 05 Nov 2024

Dinosaurs: A pop-up book by Ingela P Arrhenius

Sweden-based illustrator, Ingela P Arrhenius has brought together two things almost guaranteed to capture the attention and imagination of any child – dinosaurs and a pop-up book. 

The book is printed with stiff card pages and is aimed at a younger audience than many other dinosaur-fact books and it is organised in a quite different way. Arrhenius has ‘grouped’ her dinosaurs together under the heading of their main physical characteristics – so we get ‘Long Necks’, ‘Spiky Dinos’, ‘Frilly Heads’, ‘Feathered Friends’ and ‘Fast and Fierce’ (this latter always being the favourite!). 

Each group of animals is given a double page spread with a pop-up representation of one of the dinosaurs standing up in the middle of the spread. Around each three-dimensional dinosaur is a series of flaps that can be opened to reveal a range of information about the group of dinos that are being showcased.

Crucially, Arrhenius has gone out of her way to anchor these facts in everyday comparisons that children might be able to get their heads around – this is important given how easy it is to pack a book with numbers and measurements that are meaningless to the audience. 

Let me give you an example of what I mean:

“Dreadnoughtus weighed more than an aeroplane.”

“An Apatosaurus egg was around the size of a basketball!”

“Pentaceratops has a huge skull, the size of a car.”

And there are plenty more like this and all the flaps when opened have their own delightful, small illustration to accompany the fact.

Readers are also given a clear and easily understood phonetic spelling of the dinosaur’s name – many of which will be familiar but plenty that they will never have come across before.

The most popular of all – Tyrannosaurus Rex – comes along in the final spread and is surrounded by plenty of other fearsome beasts and ends the book with a bang.

But the author has been cognisant of the age of the audience she’s aiming at and none of the dinosaurs depicted throughout the book are too threatening or scary for the youngest children.

It’s a book that could work well at home or in school or pre-school settings and the robust construction should ensure that eager readers won’t destroy it easily.

Available now from Walker Books, you can get you copy from your local independent bookshop – who will be happy to order you a copy if they don’t have it on their shelves.

Terry Potter

November 2024