Ken Jennings - Dinosaurs

KEN JENNINGS grew up in Seoul, South Korea, where he became a daily devotee of the quiz show Jeopardy! In 2004, he successfully auditioned for a spot on the show, and went on an unprecedented seventy-four-game victory streak worth $2.52 million. Jennings book Brainiac , about his Jeopardy! adventures, was a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, as were his follow-up books, Maphead and Because I Said So! Jennings lives outside Seattle with his wife, Mindy; his son, Dylan; his daughter, Caitlin; and an excitable little dog named Chance. Visit Ken on the Web at ken-jennings.com.

MIKE LOWERY is an illustrator and fine artist whose work has been seen in galleries and publications internationally. Mike is the illustrator of Moo Hoo and Ribbit Rabbit by Candace Ryan; The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School by Laura Murray; and the Doctor Proctors Fart Powder novels by Jo Nesbo. Currently he is a professor of illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with a lovely German frau, Katrin, and his supergenius daughter, Allister. You can visit him on the Web at MikeLowery.com.

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LITTLE SIMON

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing Division

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First Little Simon edition February 2016

Text copyright 2016 by Ken Jennings. Illustrations copyright 2016 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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Jacket design by Elizabeth Doyle and Steve Scott

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jennings, Ken, 1974 author.

Dinosaurs / by Ken Jennings ; illustrated by Mike Lowery.

pages cm. (Ken Jennings junior genius guides)

Audience: Ages 810. Audience: Grades 4 to 6.

ISBN 978-1-4814-2956-6 (hc) ISBN 978-1-4814-2955-9 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-4814-2957-3 (eBook) 1. DinosaursJuvenile literature. I. Lowery, Mike, 1980 illustrator. II. Title. III. Series: Jennings, Ken, 1974 Ken Jennings junior genius guides.

QE861.5.J48 2016

567.9dc23

2015015523

Hello, my friends! I am your knowledge guru and all-around role model, Ken Jennings. You may call me Professor Jennings.

I can tell by your large brains and hairy heads that you are all mammals. Good job, everyone! Its great to be a mammal, isnt it? We have pretty much ruled the earth for the last sixty million years. But in todays class were heading back into earths prehistoric past, to find out who was running the show before the mammals. (Spoiler warning: You will not believe this, but IT WAS GIANT REPTILES!)

We have billions of years of prehistory and hundreds of different amazing dinosaurs to cover today. But even that huge amount of knowledge should be no problem for a Junior Genius. Remember, our official motto is Semper quaerens , which is Latin for Always curious.

Before we leave the twenty-first century behind, lets say the Junior Genius Pledge! Place your right finger to your temple, face this drawing of Albert Einstein, and repeat after me!

With all my fellow Junior Geniuses, I solemnly pledge to quest after questions, to angle for answers, to seek out, and to soak up. I will hunger and thirst for knowledge my whole life through, and I dedicate my discoveries to all humankind, with trivia not for just us but for all.

All right, Junior Geniuses. I hope you like volcanoes, because when you turn the page, were going to be on a very different earth.

History means writing things down, Junior Geniuses. If nobody records something happening, historians will never know about it. Keep that in mind when a grown-up promises to get you ice cream later or some other time. Get the promise in writing, or it didnt happen!

Human beings have been keeping written records for only five or six thousand years. Everything that happened before that is prehistoric before history.

We all know how time in recorded history works: We use a calendar. Days, months, years, centuries. Prehistory is different. The dinosaurs didnt know or care if it was Tuesday or Friday or March or October.

Prehistoric time uses a geologic time scale, which scientists calculate based on evidence they find in rocks. Comparing geologic time to a modern calendar is like comparing a dinosaur to a flea: Its much, much bigger.

Geologic time is measured in:

AGES

(long spans of time, hundreds of thousands of years)

that combine to make up

EPOCHS

(really long spans of time, millions of years)

that combine to make up

PERIODS

( incredibly long spans of time, tens of millions of years)

that combine to make up

ERAS

( amazingly long spans of time, hundreds of millions of years)

that combine to make up

EONS

( insanely long spans of time, billions of years)

The problem with geologic time is that its hard to wrap your brain around it. Think how long one minute can feel on the last day of school, or when theres not a vacant stall in the restroom and youre desperate . Now try to imagine one billion years worth of minutes. Good luck!

But I have a trick that may help. Lets compress the entire life of the earth down to one twenty-four-hour day. Blink your eyes once. BOOM, more than five thousand years just passed. All of human history, and you missed it. Thats how fast time is going on this scale.

If the earth has been around for only one day, it was pretty busy.

12:00 A.M. : Earth forms out of dust and gas swirling around the sun.