PSA: "The Day The Dinosaurs Died"

WARNING: Do not buy, checkout of the local library, or even open the book "The Day The Dinosaurs Died". Wow, is this book terrible for kids. I started to read it to Owen for bedtime last night and it starts with a T-rex running off smaller dinosaurs to steal the dead dinosaur they were eating on. While Mr. Rex is snacking, an asteroid is getting closer, but he eats his meal without noticing. When he looks up, it's too late.

Then, we turn to the next page and Pteranodons are blown out of the sky by the explosion, rocks boil away, everything is killed instantly. A few pages later, we meet the Triceratops grazing peacefully a few thousand miles away. Sure, the flash of light is scary, but they go back to eating. But they're not safe because there is a wall of fire is closing in around them. But they're not going to be killed by fire because there is a tsunami that's going to put out the fire and drown them all.

Some dinosaurs are lucky enough to survive the instant death by asteroid, fireballs, and tsunamis. Yay, dinosaurs live through the disaster to reproduce and repopulate the Earth? Nope, those ones are going to starve to death because they can;t find food while picking through the ashes.

When the survivors finally starve to death, at least you get to be a fossil in a museum. Again, wishful thinking, how about you get to be rodent food? And the illustrations of the rodents are not friendly, they're frightening. I made the mistake of starting to read this book at bedtime. Very quickly, I was changing sentences from 'Tyrannosaurus Rex died instantly' to 'T-Rex had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.' The Triceratops were not painfully slaughtered in a fire/tsunami, they were 'punished for not listening to their Daddies.' Then I gave up and just started flipping pages as quickly as possible. When the evil rats show up to eat the dinosaur that just starved to death, Owen stopped me and announced, "Look at the baby mice!" Yeah, baby mice that are going to help that dinosaur...

We immediately removed that book from the room and it went back to the library immediately. Even before I could scan in some of the pages for this post. I made it up to him by reading a book about people getting free dinosaurs with the purchase of a dozen doughnuts. Talk about a win-win. Daddy gets doughnuts and Owen gets a LIVE pet dinosaur according to that book. Most importantly, Daddy doesn't get up at 2 AM to console a boy crying about the horrible deaths 65 million years ago.

CK