Book One · Signal Green
Deinonychus
Say it: die-NON-ik-us
- Bramble's feathers are not made up
- The famous claw was not a knife
The back of every book, free
Two true things,
and how we know.
Every volume ends on one real animal and two claims about it that a nine-year-old could check — a bone anybody can count the bumps on, an experiment somebody actually ran. Then the page that separates what is evidence from what the story invented.
The Roost had no books left about dinosaurs. Everything on this page is ours, not theirs — what people worked out from bones, back when there were bones to work out things from. Printed at the head of the page in all ten volumes
Book Two · The Impossible Rig
Ankylosaurus
Say it: an-KY-loh-SOR-us
- The club is a hammer with a bone handle
- His nose is not a straight pipe
Book Three · The Salt Run
Triceratops
Say it: try-SERRA-tops
- Triceratops had hundreds of teeth, and used them like scissors instead of like a grinder
- A young Triceratops's horns pointed the wrong way
Book Four · The Collar and the Key
Utahraptor
Say it: YOO-tah-rap-tor
- It is the biggest raptor anybody has found, and it was found by its foot
- There is a nine-ton block of rock in a workshop with a whole group of them inside it
Book Five · Nine Small Thieves
Compsognathus
Say it: komp-SOG-nay-thus
- We know what it ate because one of them died with dinner still inside it
- The same lagoons gave us one of the first birds
Book Six · The Long Note
Parasaurolophus
Say it: pa-ra-SORE-oh-LOAF-us
- The crest is a tube, and the tube is folded
- Babies had almost no crest, and it grew
Book Seven · Say It Again
Microraptor
Say it: MY-kro-rap-tor
- It had four wings, and two of them were its legs
- We have a good idea what colour it was, and it is not a guess about a mood
Book Eight · The Far Map
Gallimimus
Say it: gal-ih-MY-mus
- It had no teeth, and it may have been a strainer
- It grew a second set of feathers when it grew up
Book Nine · The Law of the Roost
Deinocheirus
Say it: DYE-no-KY-rus
- For nearly fifty years, almost all anybody had was the arms
- It swallowed stones on purpose
Book Ten · Nine Minutes
Maiasaura
Say it: my-ah-SAW-ra
- A woman who ran a rock shop found the babies
- The nests were parked one adult apart
Where these come from. Every claim traces to a source a named person opened — the paper that made the claim, or a catalogued specimen with the institution holding it. Encyclopedia sites, documentaries and search results are not sources of record here. The standard, and the honest state of it, is on the schools page.