Chicken Frank, Dinosaur!

August 15, 2021
A DNA test returns a pullet surprise for feathered Frank and his skeptical farmyard friends. The other animals are slow to accept Frank's insistence that he's evolved from dinosaurs, no matter how often he draws family trees in the dirt, points out how much his feet resemble those of T. rex, and insists that he had a tail before he was hatched (he still has one, as confused readers can plainly see, but never mind). As further proof, he points to a living relative revealed by his DNA test...that would be Ike Alligator, who arrives on scene looking for lunch (Frank will "taste like chicken," predicts a horrified cow) but stays to study the evidence and then join an expedition to the aquarium to meet some even more distant relatives. In big, squared-off panels, one or two per page, Ensslin mixes ensembles of dubious-looking livestock with diagrams and labeled genealogical lines. In the text, Wenger delivers, first in dialogue and then a prose afterword, elementary discourses on evolutionary change, inherited characteristics, DNA, the dino-bird connection, and finally a select glossary of animal groupings. If the tone is more overtly instructional here than in, say Guido van Genechten's The Truth About Dinosaurs (2018) or Drew Sheneman's Dinosaurs Are Not Extinct! (2020), the author and illustrator still stir some fun into the pedagogy. Not exactly news but a lively tongue-in-beak lecture from a latter-day theropod. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

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