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Dinosaur Toys and Games
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| Dinosaur Toys and Games for Gifted Kids |
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Editorial Review
This board game, which can be played at four different levels of complexity, is a good way to introduce young kids to prehistoric life on earth. It's played a bit like Candyland: You roll a die and move your fossil playing piece over colored spaces. Progress around the board coincides with the extraordinary evolution of dinosaurs that roamed the planet as far back as 570 million years ago. As the animals adapt and change, players can land on squares that advance their path ("Develop lungs. Swim ahead three spaces.") or hold them back ("Bitten by Plesiosaurus. Paddle back two spaces."). When you land on a creature, collect the matching creature cutout and place it on its skeleton on your side of the board. The winning player is the first to collect all nine of his or her allotted cutouts. (In more advanced levels of the game, players have to answer questions about the dinosaur before collecting the cutout.) --Tom Keogh |
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FYI: Did you know that pterodactyls are not dinosaurs? There were no flying dinosaurs! So what exactly is a dinosaur?
Richard Owen, a British scientist, coined the term "dinosaur" in 1842. It comes from a combination of the Greek words "deinos," meaning "fearfully great," and "sauros," meaning "lizard." Put them together and you get "fearfully great lizard."
Dino- saurs aren't really lizards, though. Lizards, like all reptiles, walk with their legs sprawled out to the side, giving them that characteristic kind of slithering waddle. Dinosaurs, on the other hand, walked with their legs directly under their bodies -- the first animals to do so! The position of their legs under their bodies also gave them a more upright posture than lizards and all reptiles have.
 Dino-
saur
legs were different from reptile legs in other ways too: rather than pointing sideways, their front legs had backward-pointing knees and their back legs had
forward- pointing knees. In addition, their
front legs tended to be shorter and lighter than their rear legs.
Other characteristics of dinosaurs include egg-laying and land-dwelling. That means that no dinosaurs swam in oceans, lakes or rivers, or flew in the sky!
Dino-
saurs
roamed the earth for about 160 million years and then disappeared. Still today no one knows for sure exactly why they disappeared, but there are several theories.
The period of time during which dinosaurs lived is known as the Mesozoic era. This period, which lasted from 265 to 65 million years ago,
consisted of three smaller time periods -- Triassic, Jurassic, and the
Cretaceous. The Tyrannosaurus Rex
lived during the Jurassic period.
If your child would like to read about dinosaurs, here are some books about them!
For more dinosaur books, visit the dinosaur book page at Gifts for Learning
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