Tiny Dino Worlds: Create Your Own Prehistoric Habitats, by Christine Bayles Kortsch

It is unclear to me at least how popular terrariums or related types of gardens are to me. Once upon a time I had a terrarium for myself that lasted for some time before drying out and becoming infested by ants, but I have seldom heard friends of mine talk about their own efforts with glass gardens or seen such efforts in their homes. Indeed, it has been far more popular for me to see people writing books about terrariums and encouraging people to make their own glass gardens with various small plants organized in novel and interesting fashions, sometimes with small models, all to be managed with very small amounts of water sprayed into the jars to keep such plants well-watered in their humid containers. Yet I am not sure how many people, at least within my acquaintance, have developed an interest in such matters and so it is hard for me to know just how useful and practical or popular such appeals are. This makes it somewhat difficult to understand at least how large of a potential market a book like this is aimed at. Are there millions of people who would enjoy and relish the chance to make jar gardens and terrariums like the kind discussed in this book, or is there only a very small niche audience? It is hard to say.

At any rate, whether the market of a book like this one is large or small, the book has a clear purpose in mind. That purpose is to encourage parents to enlist their children to help in building small prehistoric habitats that use rocks, model dinosaurs, and readily accessible (?) plants in containers, some of them more or less closed, some of them very open to the outside world, that show scenes and habitats that would have been common in the bygone age of dinosaurs. In addition, many of these dino worlds have various elements within that are meant to be built by children, presumably with adult supervision and possibly also help. It is unclear what the intended budget for these particular dino worlds are. I am not sure how easy it is nor how inexpensive it is to obtain the sorts of models that the author has in mind, given that there are specific models for these gardens that the author conceives it to be simple and straightforward to obtain. If any readers of this are able to verify that the author is correct in assuming that these model worlds are easy to make as the book specifies, I would like to know, personally.

In terms of its contents, this book is between 125 and 150 pages, divided into 11 chapters, that contain 26 kid-friendly projects to create habitats for model dinosaurs. The book begins with a welcome to the Mezozoic era and some beginning tips on how to create dinosaur worlds. This is followed by two projects designed to show off the flying Coelophysis, namely a fallen log terrarium and a dragonfly in amber (1). This is followed by two projects designed to show off dino tracks (but no dinos) in the and ribbons terrarium with baked tracks (2). This is followed by an underwater terrarium and salt dough ammonite that show off the Plesiosaurus under the sea (3). Jurassic giants Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Apatosaurus find their home in a box terrarium with designer dinos (4). Tapejara takes to the skies in a seaside terrarium with colored sand (5). Maiasaura poo is the center of a forest floor terrarium with coprolites (6). A T-rex and triceratops fight to the death in a cliffside battle terrarium with a lead hunt and gratitude tree (7). A river run terrarium with slime shows what happens when a brachylophosaurus dies (8). An erupting volcano terrarium with a paper-mache volcano shows what happens after the titanosaurs die (9). A Utah dinosaur dig shows off fossil impressions (10), and the last chapter shows how to through a dino-tastic party with mini dino terrariums, dinosaur ice eggs, dino cards, a sandbox dino dig, dino stamp wrapping paper, and volcano ice cream cake (11), after which the book ends with acknowledgments, an interview transcript, dinos in detail, an index, and information about the author and contributors.