This is not a kid’s book. A child couldn’t decipher the instructions or execute them. It’s not an adult book because adults working on a model this intricate would choose a ship in a bottle or hooked rug – a hobby to enhance living room decor and not be eaten by the family cat. Instead, this book is promoted as a family project, but I think that most kids would be relegated to watching dad or mom wrestle with the instructions and drift away in boredom. The project consists of boiling, removing, and carving the bones from three chickens, then painstakingly gluing them together to form a replica of a dinosaur skeleton. Author Christoper McGowan – a well-known paleontologist – took 17 hours to complete his skeleton.

The book illustrates what happens when a great idea meets poor production. While the instructions are exhaustively detailed, the book is cheaply produced, printed in black and white with meagre diagrams on pulpy paper.

The design by Nancy Singer does not separate and streamline information. A good designer is sympathetic to the reader and this book shows none of that. Diagrams of bones and so forth are clear but float on pages adjacent to instructions, making the reader hunt for pertinent information.

An expert on a subject is not automatically a how-to writer. While Christopher McGowan packed the manuscript with information, it is still beyond the easy understanding of a non-paleontologist with sentences throughout that read like this one: “Thread the sacral vertebrae with the double transverse processes onto the backbone string, starting with the vertebrae with the longest process.” To make this a kids’ or family book, a simpler, clumsier version of the dinosaur would have been acceptable to both kids and parents and more fun to make. Also, simplified terminology with sidebars for information was desperately needed for a project this involved.