INSIDE-OUTSIDE DINOSAURS

Munro moves from architecture to paleontology for her latest Inside-Outside album, portraying each of eight familiar dinosaurs as a fossil skeleton and then, on the next spread, fleshing the specimen out and posing it in an open, natural setting with several other creatures of the same era. Though she takes a conservative course in using pale colors and only occasionally depicting skin with stripes or other patterns, young dinophiles will relish the cleanly drawn details and (on the alternate spreads) non-gory, easy-to-follow predator-prey chases in the backgrounds. Except for name labels (and their transliterations into English) there is no text until the closing visual keys, which are linked to a few sentences of basic information about each dinosaur plus identifications of other animals visible in each scene. Pre-readers in particular will be drawn to this prehistoric primer. (bibliography, web resources) (Informational picture book. 4-6)