Utah's Dinosaurs: Dinosaur Mountain

Some things are always cool.  Giant squid.  Meteors.  Sword play.  Dinosaurs.  And books.  So books about these things are even cooler.  Deborah Kogan Ray's Dinosaur Mountain (a Cybils Nonfiction Picture Book finalist) delivers real dinosaurs and the men who dug them up.  The illustrations are painted rather than photographs, showing the hardships and the beauty surrounding the quarries where dinosaurs grew up.

I would have preferred a tighter focus on Earl Douglas; the book takes a while to narrow down to the Carnegie (later Douglas) quarry where so many Jurassic skeletons were found.  The side bars from Douglas's diary entry were interesting, although my fourth graders had trouble deciphering the small cursive writing.  An interesting book, but without the WOW factor of Bones.  B