She does a good job of introducing different types of fossils, even including different pieces of information that may be gleaned from fossil footprints.Īliki then goes on to talk about mammoths in ice, amber, and how fossils can tell us about the environments when the rocks were deposited, introducing many more types of fossils along the way. Aliki’s description of coal as a fossil is great. I do like the use of the famous Xiphactinus fossil as the lead example as it is a fascinating fossil in its own right and thus a good fossil with which to hook readers. The description of the fossilization process is simplistic and doesn’t get into the microbes precipitating minerals around the bones during decomposition, but that was not known when the book was written and the description in the book is sufficiently accurate for the level of reader at which the book is aimed. In a quick 32 pages, Aliki provides a wealth of information well written for the intended reading level of early elementary kids.įossils starts off describing what fossils are and how they are formed. ISBN: 978-0-06-4455093-5įossils Tell of Long Ago endeavors to explain what fossils are, how they form, and what they can tell us. Some people might find the reviews a bit lengthy, so here they are in a nutshell: still good reads for kids, even better with a few additional comments to update them and correct a few misconceptions that kids might get from the simplicity needed to pare down complicated subjects into something that would fit the space constraints and interest levels. I will review four of them here, two in this post and two in a following post. How have they held up? Surprisingly well, for the most part, better than the majority of books published at the same time.

Unlike many books of the time, these were about as accurate as one could expect to get without going into so much detail that a person of that reading level would feel overwhelmed.But it has been 25 years or more since then. We’ve learned a lot since then. The main text was supplemented with word balloons for the human characters, supplying interesting tidbits and additional information, so should not be ignored. The books were voluminously illustrated with colored pencil drawings of fossils and people studying them. When they came out in the 1980s, they were widely regarded as excellent books for children. Among these books are ones about fossils and dinosaurs written for 5 to 9-year -olds (I think 4-8 would be a better range, as many 4-year-olds will like the books and most nine-year-olds will have moved on to books with more information). Aliki Brandenberg, known mostly simply as Aliki, has written several popular books for children in the Let’s-Read-And-Find-Out Science series published by Harper Collins.

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