Synopsis: No one has ever seen a dinosaur. But we can put fossil bones together and imagine what they looked like and how they lived. You might never have seen one – as the title says – but we can have great fun thinking of all the colours they were and might have been. Cinematic variety in the pictures – informs and amuses – a sure winner.

Review: Short books need even better structure than long ones, and this one is just right. Two parts – the first putting dinosaurs together from bones into skeletons, and then getting dinosaurs to complain they don’t have any colour, and then the second part giving them colour, including some wild fantasy colours. Dinosaurs big and small, dull and bright, real like the stegosaurus and imaginary like the superdupersaurus, they peer and jump out of page after page here, staring at the reader, asking ‘don’t leave us like this!’ and ‘am I red because the volcanoes exploded?’ or ‘if I ate raspberry ripple ice-cream would I become a pink and white dinosaur?’.

Adrian Potts (‘Professor Potts’ on the front page) weaves some geological or archaeological information in at the start, but the tone is informal: one dinosaur skeleton says to another ‘you’ve got no clothes on!’. Another wants a skin and gets a strawberry blonde hair-do. Once Potts gives them all a shape, they then complain they have no colour, so that’s what they get next. Some wanted and needed it in order to hide (plenty about camouflage here), others to avoid being eaten (‘food is not blue!’), and yet others simply didn’t care – they were too big for it to matter.

 Illustrations are not only brightly coloured but interactive – you turn your head with the images, you look up and down and sometimes at small dinosaurs through the mouths of big ones. Some are improbable colours and ask if you like them. One endpaper is a palate of possible colours (including brontosaurus blush) and the other a dinosaur to colour for yourself. So they could be all these shapes and colours – but no one has ever seen one, actually. A novelty item which offers much more.

2006-12-08