Options For Educating Your Littles About Prehistoric Animals
- Writermouse
- May 2, 2020
- 8 min read
(Alligator Snapping Turtle, photographed by yours truly at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, TN circa February 2020 - just about the most 'prehistoric' critter in my camera roll!)
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Hi! Writermouse here! I've been researching garden and chicken coop ideas the last few days, so it's a relief to sit down and get into one of my true loves – paleontology!
You know how they say there's one dinosaur-crazy kid in each class? Yeah, that was me. Dinosaurs and horses, and as I grew older, I pretty much expanded to all things feathered, furred, and scaled. (Not gonna lie, my friends used to tease me because my favorite dinosaur books were so dry and technical the other 2nd graders couldn't read them, and I could spell and pronounce Pachycephalosaurus, Parasaurolophus, and Deinocheirus before I was 8. AND tell you what they were, where and when they lived, and that all we knew back then about Deinocheirus was that it had really really long arms... Told ya I was THAT kid!)
I love to get online and follow my nose to interesting tidbits of information, so today, I thought I'd share some of my favorite sources for good prehistoric critter 'fo.
My search usually begins with a basic query: recent news articles about dinosaurs/prehistoric mammals. That'll net you ScienceDaily, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Science, Phys.org, and Reuters. All are excellent sources for good science news. Avoid Livescience and Plosone if you can. None are bad sources persay, but Livescience can be a little political and Plosone is an open-publish magazine that occasionally lets someone publish that maybe shouldn't have.
(I've had to take Plosone with a grain of salt ever since they allowed a beautifully researched and gorgeously laid out paper detailing the fact that large herbivores like horses and rhinos can only move with 3 feet on the ground at all times, that Leonardo Davinci's art and 4/5's of the modern art world is clearly wrong, and that all movie depictions of horses are in fact incorrect – including the most famous horse video ever made, literally the 1st moving picture ever filmed! I have to believe that paper would never have made it to publication if the scientists involved had interviewed a single horse trainer, zoo keeper, or 5 year old girl...)
You can check that disaster out here:
Plosone lost me in that article at Figure 4, where they CORRECTED LEONARDO DAVINCI'S Trotting Horse, erroneously assuming the sketch to depict a WALKING horse. The title of the sketch is Trotting Horse, AND IN FACT CORRECTLY DEPICTS AN ANDALUSIAN AT THAT GAIT! Ugh! What bothers me the most is that the science is so good, but based on such a horrible premise! So yeah, Plosone can be good, can be great, but it's not my favorite...
Whoops, back on track!
My first go-to after reading whatever new article I've found is Wikipedia. I know, I know, everyone SWEARS Wikipedia is a horrible source for information and absolutely CANNOT be used as a resource for school papers. I've probably just totally LOST anyone reading this article. Oh, well. All I can say is, when it comes to prehistoric creatures, Wikipedia's a little dry sometimes but the people there are extremely accurate and unbiased and they keep themselves pretty well up to date. I find out a lot of basics (and not so basics) just by looking up my topic in their search bar.
I consider Wikipedia a pretty great resource for the teenager/more mature preteen who enjoys straight facts and, like me, is a major dinosaur buff. It can be a bit limited if you try to go too far down the info rabbit hole – some of the less-known creatures/plants have very little in the way of information – but the Wiki staff try to put up what they know, including if there are any controversies surrounding the fossils, if there are any hoaxes associated with the animal, things like that. I'm especially fascinated by The Bone Wars!
Try it out yourself – search 'Tyrannosaur' and you'll notice that Wikipedia is your first source of information in the results. If it isn't, I want to use your search engine! Anyway, click on the Wikipedia link and check out their offering on 'Tyrannosaurus'. If you think your child could handle the cut-and-dried technical narration, great! If not, hang on, I have other options for you!
Here's a link to 23 books suggested for pre-k through 5th grade, to introduce kids to dinosaurs or feed that insatiable hunger. I've read about half of them and heard of the other half, so I know the titles are sound. Have fun!! And thank you to We Are Teachers for this comprehensive list!!
For preschoolers and littles, I found this wonderful site at Little Bins For Little Hands. Here are 12 interactive ideas for dinosaur play for children who like dinosaurs and are interested in STEM – or who you'd LIKE to be interested in STEM! Not gonna lie here, I wish I'd thought of even ONE of these things to do with my daughter when she was a toddler!! And thank you so much to the people at Little Bins For Little Hands for making my search for resources that much easier!!
If you'd like your little to spend some time at a quieter activity, or if you're looking for something to entertain a little one who's under the weather, here are a couple of great options:
For coloring options for those still learning motor control:
For coloring options for those with better motor control:
I had intended to add a link to a list of apps, but after a brief search I realized I'm going to have to turn my expert loose on it – my daughter and my cousin's toddler are going to be busy for the next few weeks!
I had never looked at the actual teaching-materials options before, but I absolutely fell in love with this one. I don't think it's free, but boy did it look good! A more technical and less playful option for those who are trying to build an actual lesson plan around dinosaurs for their preschooler.
And here's an option I found for those with older children:
For video learning options for children 0-120:
Never ever ever downplay the amazing child-friendly DINOSAUR TRAIN! No, for real, that show helped keep me sane for YEARS. And my teenager still sits down and watches it when it comes on TV. 'Dinosaur Train' is far and away the coolest dinosaur show for young kids that I can think of.
I also have a particular fondness for BBC material, especially the 'Walking With' series, and if you can find it, 'Prehistoric Park with Nigel Marvin' is well worth it. I kept my kid entertained with 'Park' even after she'd mostly outgrown 'Dinosaur Train'. There are only 8 or 9 episodes, but it's a lot of fun to watch even as an adult.
I also HIGHLY recommend the 'Ancient Earth' series on Curiosity Stream. The first series is a series of shorts that focus mostly on famous extinctions, but there are now multiple seasons and some of the videos are full 55 minute documentaries. Well worth signing up for Curiosity Stream.
I also especially recommend Curiosity Stream's 'Amazing Dinoworld' – ESPECIALLY if you have a 4k television or a 4k computer screen. Jumpin' Jehoosephat does 'Amazing Dinoworld' look sooo good!!! A guaranteed keep-your-little-entranced-at-the-pretty. Also quite effective on recalcitrant teenagers, if they like dinosaurs even a teensy bit! And gets a 98% on accuracy, too! (I can't give it 100% because we don't know what we don't know, if you know what I mean.)
For the older teenager – 12 in my house but I understand 16-17 is more the norm – Curiosity Stream's 'First Man' is well worth a look-see. I recommend watching it yourself before letting any truly impressionable children look at it, because it doesn't really pull any punches, but it's a solid docu-drama that's chock-full of good information about human evolution and what we may have looked like/done as we became what and who we are today.
For that older kid who's not in the mood to learn but loves dinosaurs, I have to admit that the Jurassic Park franchise still has it going on. There are plenty of inaccuracies, but for sheer beauty and technical skill those old movies are top 10 for me. The museum-quality puppets they built and used mean that there's not a lot of CG mess-ups to catch your kid's eye and make him go 'MOO-OOM!'
Check out this article I found about the puppets here!
Somewhere in my huge pile of old photographs, I have a picture of one of the puppets used on the set of Jurassic Park II: The Lost World (I think). It was used in the movie and then sold to a local dinosaur museum that no longer exists here in Tennessee, and guys? I got to touch it. Just saying.
Youtube is actually a good option, as well, sometimes, and there's a wonderful channel called 'PBS Eons' that produces a new, 10-12 minute video on a specific topic every few weeks. They're extremely accurate and full of anecdotes and information that make it understandable for even a dinosaur dunce, and they cover the gamut from Earth before life evolved to right before the advent of written history. I highly recommend checking them out! They even have a website, although I hadn't absorbed that until I was researching this!
(They have HOURS of videos up at this point, but I'm not sure how this one would measure up for a toddler's attention span. My own daughter's a teenager and dearly loves this channel, but it didn't exist when she was little and I don't have personal experience of the matter. All I can suggest is try? Maybe? It will certainly appeal to the kids 7-8 and up, but I'm not sure about the itsies. And I watch it while I eat breakfast every morning, just to get a dose of dinos before work. There's plenty of content to keep me entertained the 3rd and 4th time through!)
I hope to actually sit down someday and make a list of my favorite documentaries on Prehistory, Dinosaurs, Prehistoric Mammals, Pterosaurs, extinction events, oh that list goes ON, but I hope I've given you a good beginning!
I'll finish this up with some other books that grace my own shelves and one that I'd dearly, dearly love to own someday.
There's the obvious: Michael Crichton's greats, Jurassic Park and The Lost World, and Congo, believe it or not. His son published one of his early works posthumously in 2017, a book titled Dragon Teeth. That one's about The Bone Wars of the 18th century, and very interesting despite being fiction. It's really a lot of fun to read, too, BECAUSE it's fiction. Both Jurassic Park and The Lost World are difficult books for middle schoolers, and Congo is a little in-your-face, but high school brains typically handle them fine. Dragon Teeth is one I gave to my daughter at 11 with no qualms, and she enjoyed it, so it's written more in the Young Adult style.
Then there's Robert T. Bakker's Raptor Red, a fictional depiction of the life and times of a Utahraptor and her family, published in 1995. I thoroughly endorse this book for its accuracy, emotion and lyrical narration. Bakker himself is a well-known paleontologist and preacher, and the introduction to the book tells a bit of the discovery of Utahraptor and of his own time spent as a technical advisor to Stephen Spielburg during the making of 'Jurassic Park'. Raptor Red is written for Young Adults, but my daughter did one of her first book reports on it at 11, so it's a fairly easy read. A true must-have for the dino-crazy teenager, and mature enough to entertain even the dino-crazy adult.
Robert Bakker has several 'Step-Into-Reading' books about dinosaurs, as well, levels 4 and 5, and a really cool nonfiction book he wrote called The Dinosaur Heresies. I've read all of his fiction, so I can absolutely endorse it, and The Heresies has been a teaching text/required reading in several colleges that I know of. Here's a link to his page:
And last but not least, there's a book called The Midnight Moropus. written by Joan Aiken. I haven't gotten to read it yet, but since it's about a prehistoric species of equine-relative, called a Moropus, you can bet your boots I want a copy. It's filed under Juvenile Fiction, and the previews look like it would appeal to 7-12 year olds mostly. Here's a link for you to check it out:
I waxed a little long-winded, so I'll say goodbye for now. Expect a more comprehensive list of resources for children in the next few weeks, and in the mean-time, check out the links I've already provided. Let me know if I was helpful to you! Writermouse OUT!!
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