Big Babies

A portrait gallery of baby dinos and dino cousins.

Going straight for the “AWWWW” reaction from viewers, O’Brien poses 11 big-eyed, usually fuzzy prehistoric hatchlings on plain white backgrounds in front of huge, slightly blurred parental legs that extend past the page tops. He doesn’t stint on the factual load, either. Along with identifying labels, each creature comes with an informative one- or two-sentence comment, such as, for the stegosaurus (“roofed lizard”): “This pint-sized critter grew into a leaf-eater that had a body the size of an elephant but a brain the size of a meatball.” Just for reference, a plate of meatballs is placed…

The term “dinosaur” may conjure a towering Tyrannosaurus rex or lumbering stegosaurus, buteven the largest creatures had tiny beginnings. What might they have looked like when theywere young? Here, readers are invited to marvel at prehistoric youngsters and learn a few factsalong the way. Each baby gets its own adorable spread, and they’re all pictured next to a relatedmodern object (a toy car, a rubber duck), adding a sense of scale as well as whimsy. The focusstays primarily on the infant, with the adult only sometimes glimpsed as giant legs in thebackground. There are plenty of familiar…