Lulu's parents refuse to give in when she demands a brontosaurus for her birthday and so she sets out to find her own, but while the brontosaurus she finally meets approves of pets, he does not intend to be Lulu's.

A Hudson Booksellers Staff Pick for the Best Books of 2013 One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Spring Science Books A Bookshop Santa Cruz Staff Pick Dinosaurs, with their awe-inspiring size, terrifying claws and teeth, and otherworldly abilities, occupy a sacred place in our childhoods. They loom over museum halls, thunder through movies, and are a fundamental part of our collective imagination. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, the dinosaur fanatic Brian Switek enriches the childlike sense of wonder these amazing creatures instill in us. Investigating the latest discoveries in paleontology, he breathes new life into old bones. Switek reunites us with these mysterious creatures as he visits desolate excavation sites and hallowed museum vaults, exploring everything from the sex life of Apatosaurus and T. rex's feather-laden body to just why dinosaurs vanished. (And of course, on his journey, he celebrates the book's titular hero, "Brontosaurus"—who suffered a second extinction when we learned he never existed at all—as a symbol of scientific progress.) With infectious enthusiasm, Switek questions what we've long held to be true about these beasts, weaving in stories from his obsession with dinosaurs, which started when he was just knee-high to a Stegosaurus. Endearing, surprising, and essential to our understanding of our own evolution and our place on Earth, My Beloved Brontosaurus is a book that dinosaur fans and anyone interested in scientific progress will cherish for years to come.

"Provocative and delightfully discursive essays on natural history. . . . Gould is the Stan Musial of essay writing. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit it with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best."--John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review

The life story of the dinosaur "Ajax".

Bertram Phillips's M.I.N.D. Machine throws him back to southern California's Jurassic period, and this time it also throws real dinosaurs forward into the halls of Wetherford Junior High! Bertram's only chance of setting things right again is to accept the help of J.D. "Judgment Day" Harms, the biggest bully in the eighth grade and the second-smartest student after Bertram. But J.D.'s own plans aren't pretty, and they may change the future forever.

Brontosaurus, by Leanne Grabel, is a startlingly unique memoir that details-with deep insight and remarkable humor-the love and sex life of the author following the kidnapping and rape she survives one afternoon in 1972, when she is nineteen, sheltered and naive. She and two college friends set off on a camping trip into Mexico for spring break, and just as their frolic begins on a deserted Baja beach, two masked, armed bandits intervene and change their lives forever. In the wake of this traumatic event, the story follows her through her years at Stanford University, her job at Billie Jean King's WomenSports magazine, a backpacking trip across Europe, and her move from her hometown of Stockton, California, to Portland, Oregon, where she tries to settle down, far from Mexico. She attempts to immerse herself in the vibrant Portland poetry scene, but is waylaid again and again by doomed and destructive romantic entanglements. The years pass turbulently, and when she finally meets the man who eventually becomes her husband and the father of their two daughters, she begins to realize she how much that day in the distant past still haunts her relationships, both with men and with herself. The wound has never healed. She then begins the long and sometimes comical process of trying to figure out what she's going to do about it, and as the book comes to a close in the present day, she has by chance stumbled into a teaching job at a school for incarcerated girls who all suffer from the same wound. As she finds ways to help them heal themselves, she, too, begins to heal. Brontosaurus is profound, heart-wrenching, sexy, and laugh-out-loud funny-often in the same paragraph-rewarding the reader again and again for every minute spent between its pages.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS/AGES 4-8