Soar-a-sauruses! Dinosoaring by Deb Lund

Having swamped a sailing ship at sea and rocked the rails on their own loco- dino-motive, those go-go dinos have sworn off all forms of transport. But boredom always sets in and gets these saurians back on the move, and the wild blue yonder calls these super-sized would-be fly-guys. But physics is a problem.

"We're dinohuge--just look around.
We'll never get this off the ground."
But they concoct a dinoplan
That gets them cheering, "Yes, we can."

These awesome aviators clamber into the belly of their enormous KC-97L, but soon find that attaining airspeed with a load of tyranosaurs, stegosaurs, brachiosaurs, and the odd tricerotops, is going to require some kind of assisted takeoff power. They trying huffing out the back loading bay of the plane. They try flapping their arms. No go. Finally they decide to give a push-off a try. Liftoff!

As the fearless fliers reach cruising altitude, they realize that their flight plan is taking them right over an air show in progress. What could be better than dinosaur stunts in the blue? They wing-walk. They swing from trailing trapezes and execute death-defying fly-bys. The crowd goes wild. But then, the devil-may-care dinos have another brush with the laws of aero-dinamics.

It's a terror-inducing transport plane tailspin. These dinosoarers find out that getting into the air was the easy part of this flight!

It's time to bail on this aviation adventure.

With ripcords pulled they're quite a sight.
All dinoswinging left to right.

With Deb Lund's rip-roaring rhyming couplets to provide the motive power in their forthcoming Dinosoaring (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), illustrator Howard Fine takes off, artistic throttle wide open, with mega-bright, full-bleed double-page spreads that that make the most of his dizzy dinosaurs in all their immense dimensions. Fine makes the most of opportunities for fanciful and dramatic in-flight perspectives, ending this aviation adventure with an underneath view of the gloriously colored chutes with their dangling dinos floating down for a soft landing.

And although once on the ground these dinotrippers again swear off extreme expeditions forever, experience suggests that when dino-ennui sets in, these dinopranksters will soon be on the mo-o-o-ve, hinted at in Fine's last spread, showing a herd of bemused heifers watching some would-be automo-sauring dinos looking wistfully down that long, open road.

Earlier tyranno-travelogues in this series are All Aboard the Dinotrain and Dinosailors.