More Dino Dad Reviews links. This blog post is only "ultimate" in the same way that Jurassic World: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book is: by which I mean I'm sure there will be more installments after this one. Seriously, though, the JW pop-up book is pretty great, despite lacking any scenes from Dominion. It's produced by Matthew Reinhart, the master craftsman of pop-up books. He already did a trilogy of prehistoric themed pop-ups known as the "Encyclopedia Prehistorica" series. I've reviewed the books on Dinosaurs and Sharks, and will be reviewing Mega Beasts pretty soon.
If, like many paleo nerds, you're tired of the Jurassic Park franchise hogging all the spotlight that pop culture reserves for dinosaurs, then please watch Prehistoric Planet on AppleTV! This fantastic series does better by dinos and their contemporaries than perhaps any other mass media (whether documentary or otherwise) since Walking With Dinosaurs. It is just gorgeous.
I've got a whole slew of timeline books now to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. A Brief History of Life on Earth is the most impressive, the Usborne Timeline books are the most compact, and the "What On Earth?" timeline books are the most detailed. Within this series, The Nature Timeline Wallbook gives an overall view of life on earth, while four subsequent books take a more narrow focus on the history of specific groups of organisms in the Explorer! subseries: Plants, Bugs, Mammals, and Dinosaurs, the latter of which is ironically the only entry not yet covered at DDR.
Some other recent discoveries:
My First 100 Dinosaur Words is one of the best baby board books out there for the particularly tiny dinosaur lover. Written as part of a series of semi-joking, semi-serious "STEM for babies" books, it introduces some surprisingly advanced paleontology concepts in a surprisingly child-friendly way.
Kaleidoscope of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Life is a simply phenomenal book, utterly sweeping away one of the perceived truisms found in children's dinosaur books of yesteryear: the idea that we would never know what color prehistoric lifeforms were. It demonstrates how we in fact have startlingly detailed evidence that allows author/illustrator Greer Stothers to portray ancient life in absolutely vivid palettes.
If you're looking for unplugged activities to entertain your kids with, mine have enjoyed the Melissa & Doug Prehistoric Reusable Sticker Pad set. It's good, easy-to-contain fun, and the stickers are both enjoyably stylized and reasonably accurate for a product of this type!
