How tall was a T. Rex?

In this companion to How Long Is a Whale?, Limentani presents another fact-filled and playful look at animal subjects and relative size, this time focused on the T. rex. She uses recognizable objects as illustrated reference points: "Its eyes were as big as baseballs. Its teeth were as big as bananas." Limentani also compares T. rex's proportions to that of other dinosaurs: "A T. rex was as tall as 10 velociraptors" (in an accompanying image, 10 of the small dinosaurs are stacked one on top of another, to reach T. rex's height). And a T. rex was about as tall as a modern-day giraffe, a final spread demonstrates. Limentani works in handsome lino cuts and digitally colored collagraphs set against bright backgrounds; the illustrations capture the cozy, consistent allure of dinosaurs to the target audience, while the factual content comes in a digestible amount for readers to take away. Ages 3-6. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Based on current fossil evidence, as tall as 10 velociraptorsor one giraffe.Limentani doesn't stop with height, though, and, as in her How Much Does a Ladybug Weigh? (2016) and How Long Is a Whale? (2017), profiles her subject in full using singularly vivid comparisons. T. Rex's eyes were "as big as baseballs," its teeth the size of bananas, its body and tail together as long as "6 lions." In bold-lined, digitally colored linocut and collatype prints, she vividly demonstrates her comparisons. At one point she lines up sports balls of different sorts beneath a toothy head (playfully setting a baseball in the socket of a skeletal one on the opposite page to show placement), and at another she balances a T. Rex on one end of a teeter-totter with three 5,500-pound modern hippos on the other. She properly qualifies less-verifiable claimsT. Rex "might have been" scaly or feathered, "could have run as fast as an elephant or a meerkat"but bases her physical estimates on specific fossils dubbed "Thomas," "Stan," and "Sue" and backs them up with an appended set of size ranges in feet and inches (no metric measurements are given).A terrific introduction to the ups and downs of measurement as well as relative scale. (Informational picture book. 4-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.