INSIDE OUT T. REX

Multilayered overlapping cutouts provide an unusually detailed 3-D look at T. Rex’s innards—or at least what can be deduced about them from the fossil record.

Visible through a big acetate window on the front cover, the cutouts peel back with each turn of a sturdy page—highlighting, for instance, realistically depicted arm and leg bones, major muscle groups, or reconstructions of pulmonary and other systems. Notes around the central die cut, embellished with painted illustrations, cautiously explain what researchers know or believe from modern survivals or related fossils about each bit or system. Young dinomanes get not only a vivid anatomy lesson from this, but also a clear notion of how profoundly paleontology is based on educated guesswork: “By studying modern animals with this body structure, such as giraffes…we can guess how T. rex’s body adapted….” Other entries in the Inside Out series present similar deconstructions of a (particular) Egyptian Mummy, a (generic) Human Body, and Sharks, with a melodramatically posed great white as exemplar. Models, most of them children, in side illustrations for Human Body are diverse in age and race.

Budding biologists and others with an interest in what’s inside will be entranced.