When Dinosaurs Roamed Australia
By Sarah Jane Lightfoot
Reviewed by Mia Macrossan
This is Sarah’s second book, the first being Down the Road Little Bee, 2021, a bee’s search for pollen across the Australian suburban landscape. The title of When Dinosaurs Roamed Australia speaks for itself, it is a vivid introduction to 12 dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes whose fossils have been found in Australia.
Each spread features one dinosaur. They include armoured plant eaters, aquatic reptiles, flying lizards and more. The plant eaters looks friendly with smiling faces while the predators look quite fierce. Each dinosaur is given its correct scientific name and since these are often quite unpronouncable the added pronunciation guide is helpful.
At the back there are more details about each dinosaur which is shown to scale in comparison to all the others on the page. A map of Australia shows where each of the fossils were found. Australian dinosaurs are known mostly from fragmentary fossils, although these show that Australia had a unique and diverse range of dinosaurs. This books shows that most Australian dinosaurs come from the eastern half of Australia (Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria) although isolated dinosaur bones have been found in Western Australia and South Australia. As Sarah explains: ‘The T-Rex and Triceratops have played the main character a hundred times over, however, down here in the Southern Hemisphere, dinosaurs also roamed the land.’ Fossils continue to be uncovered throughout Australia, including in western Queensland, Shack Bay in Victoria and the Central Coast of NSW.
This book is bound to attract young dinosaur enthusiasts, with its gorgeous cover, (note the indented dinosaur footprints), its colourful dinosaurs roaming the inside, and its endpapers bright with waratahs and bansksias. It has everything to get a young reader started on their dinosaur journey. A perfect companion to The Opal Dinosaur which expalins in detail how a particular fossil find led to the discovery of a new dinosaur species. Here, Sarah has scattered 14 dinosaur fossils throughout the book for keen readers to discover, a perfect way to encourage close reading.
Recommended for home and school libraries.
Affirm Press 2024
Sarah Jane Lightfoot
