CREATURE COUNT

A jaunty prehistoric version of “Over in the Meadow” with a cast of particularly happy-looking dinos and extinct mammals.

From “a mother woolly mammoth and her little woolly one” to “a mother maiasaur and her little hatchlings ten,” family groups wreathed in smiles and depicted in vivid greens, blues and purples variously trumpet, boom, hoot, snarl, stretch and munch. Without doing violence to the rhythm’s familiar cadences, Huante varies the opening lines (“On a prehistoric mountain where the sky was so blue…” “Near a prehistoric swamp by a long, curling vine…”). Nguyen brings all of the creatures together for a closing snuggle “in the moonlight of a prehistoric night.” Lest younger readers be left with the impression that that could ever actually happen, the author explains on a closing spread that these creatures lived in different eras, and goes on beneath vignette portraits to provide a sentence or two of basic facts about each. While the aesthetic is not a particularly demanding one, there is no doubt of its appeal to the smallest dino-maniacs—even "mother T. Rex and her terrible rexes six" look cuddly.

Little hatchlings will likewise stretch, hoot and snuggle down cozily as they listen.