Cover Image: Illumisaurus

Illumisaurus

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Member Reviews

We just adore this series and love dinosaurs, so this is sure to be my daughter's favorite one of all. We had a lot of fun using the lens to view different types of living things and locations (because this was an ARC we used one we had from a previous book and it worked perfectly on my Ipad). These are very engaging non-fiction, that I find her checking out on her own again and again, and there is plenty of information to come back to and absorb next time without being overly wordy and turning off young readers.

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Take a peek at dinosaurs in a new way! A fun and inventive look at dinosaurs, their environments, and their locations.

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This book is a lot of fun. Perfect for little dinosaur fans. Top tip - you can download a viewer on your phone to view the images properly. Brilliant and fun.

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Stunning illustrations!

The artwork is vibrant and it’s hard to look away. Dino lovers will enjoy pouring over the pages to find hidden treasures. This is definitely one that will be well loved and thumbed through often in my home.

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Great book. Was a little hard to read using the netgalley app. I think my son would have been more engaged if we were able to read it on the kindle but still very educational

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What a neat interactive, introductory text about dinosaurs all over the world! The illustrations are gorgeous, though a little cluttered. I reviewed the digital edition of this book, so I wasn't able to get the full effect of what it would look like with the special lenses, but I was able to get a see the different pictures/elements contained. Each color lens reveals a different thing: dinosaur, location, and plants/prehistoric animals. This is one book where you will want the physical book. This would be a fantastic gift for a young dinosaur lover!

Thank you NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group – Wide Eyed Editions for providing this ARC.

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Yes, this book is a visual mess, and deliberately so, too. In fact it's nigh-on impossible to review legitimately when seen as a digital edition, but there you go. What I can bring to cleaning up the mess is prior knowledge of another book in this series, and several years of using this publisher as a source of real world hardbacks, and my experience says they seldom come unstuck when producing something, however far from the norm it might be, like this.

Like the mythical monster book in this series (9781786035479), we get a set pattern of introduction, diorama, and then key – taking a full double-page spread in for each, every time. By the end of this entry to the franchise, we get a slight idea to how prehistoric life evolved, varied and altered over the millions of years, and have had a look at the different corners of our current world and seen how it might once have looked. The mess comes from the use of multiple images and multiple inks on the same page, so you need a blue lens, or the red or green (all provided, of course) to single out one aspect of the mess and get a full image surprisingly revealed to us.

There are limitations to this, however, and I do think they make for a slightly flawed dinosaur book, and perhaps the format is best suited to monsters and suchlike as before as a result. First, this must be the only dinosaur book to never mention scale – yes, here and there we get told one dinosaur would have been so-and-so size, but the key could have included that data perfectly well, and allowed us to get more of an idea to the scope of the dioramas. Also, a lot of them are just randomly-placed lifeforms, and the word diorama is a little generous. They're not really interacting in any one scene, just hanging in space, looking malevolent. For a fictional subject that might be fine, but I think a bit more science behind the presentation would not have gone amiss here. With that lack of veracity, I began to see the visual gimmick of the presentation trumping the rest of what we were here for, which is a small shame. This book will still succeed in being a wonder to the right reader, however, and get them hooked on either prehistoric life or similar trick visuals of their own, but it wasn't as good as expected. Three and a half stars.

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