I can hear you now, “Mrs. O, we already know how much you love vintage books…” Well, too bad, dear readers, I’m going to keep sharing them with you. (You love them too.). Today’s vintage picture book is by Jane Thayer.
The illustrations were done by Seymour Fleishman, and the copyright is 1965.
Little Mary Ann loves dinosaurs and one day sets out to find one. She is a very lucky amateur paleontologist because she finds one who has been taking an extra long nap.
Dandy the Dinosaur is a sensation but she finds life in 1965 to be too loud to bear. The story has a happy ending though, since Mary Ann goes on to become an expert paleontologist.
I love that she becomes Dr. Mary Ann, no formalities fir this young scientist!
Actually Mary Ann would have been surprised at how much our knowledge has changed in the last 50 years. Dinosaurs were seen as cold-blooded, sluggish and not very intelligent in the 60s.
We now know that they were probably warm-blooded, brightly colored, probably had some feathers and were more like modern birds than modern reptiles.
Dr. Mary Ann would have been one of those pioneering paleontologists who changed the image of dinosaurs. She and her colleagues would be the heroes to every aspiring paleontologist in our generation.
Not bad for an old book with great illustrations.
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