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Dinosaur Tracks (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2)

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If you live in the country you have probably seen many different kinds of animals tracks and wondered what they were. If you go to the beach, it's very easy to see tracks you or others make. Often you can see bird tracks that pepper the moist sand. Everywhere you go you can see tracks that are made from "people and animals [who] are walking, running, hopping, and jumping." In the age of the dinosaurs those creatures were doing the same things and leaving their tracks behind. Weather conditions will quickly erase many footprints, but some "tracks become fossilized."

This book describes and illustrates the fascinating process whereby a simple dinosaur track could become a fossil. The fossilized track would gradually become hidden under layers of earth and would wait to be discovered millions of years later when the process reversed itself and the track surfaced. In the 1830s a man named Edward Hitchcock was amazed by the tracks he saw and began to "collect and study tracks." He became what is now called an ichnologist. This book talks about the types of tracks the many different types of dinosaurs left behind, what their tracks looked like, how many of them walked, the size of their tracks, their trackways (these tell us a lot about dinosaurs), people who have discovered tracks and who some of the dinosaurs ancestors were.

Any child who is crazy about dinosaurs should take a look at this book as he or she will have a better understanding of how and why scientists came to the conclusions they had about the origins of dinosaurs, what they did, what they looked like and many more interesting tidbits. The illustrations, especially the herd of sauropods in the centerfold, are very appealing and will thrill the dino fan. In the back of the book is a recipe for a fun experiment in which the reader can make their own "fossil footprints or handprints."