The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Dinosaur Hunter

The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World's Worst Dinosaur Hunter by Tim Collins is a funny history story for 9 year olds, told by a girl who is brilliant at finding fossils and hopeless at being taken seriously.

What happens

Ann lives on the coast in Victorian England and spends her mornings splitting rocks open with a hammer. What she finds are the bones of enormous sea creatures. What her father does with them is sell them to holidaymakers as a cure for colds, bad backs and, on one memorable occasion, untidiness.

Ann knows the bones matter. She's read the journals. She's worked out that these animals swam here an extremely long time ago. Nobody listens, because she's a girl, she's poor, and her father is standing beside her shouting about lumbago.

Then a scruffy man in a crumpled jacket steps off the coach from Bath and pays four times the asking price, because he knows exactly what the bones are.

The diary format is what makes it. You get Ann's plans, her sulks and her total certainty that she is cursed. (She once tripped and dropped a handful of fossils into a famous scientist's soup. He did not take it well.) Her terrible luck is the running joke and she tells it on herself with a very straight face.

Scattered through are GET REAL boxes with the real science. What a Plesiosaur actually was. Where the word dinosaur comes from and what it was meant to mean. They're short, they're funny, and they never feel like homework.

One thing to mention. Ann is fourteen, so your reader is following someone a good deal older than them, though the writing is aimed squarely at younger readers and never feels like a teenage book. The village poverty sits in the background too, with neighbours going days without food and a wrecked ship's barrels being shared out quietly.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who likes facts smuggled inside a story, this will suit them nicely. Tim Collins has done this for several hopeless historical figures, and the World's Worst Knight is in the library as well. That diary belongs to a squire who is certain he will be the bravest knight who ever lived, and who currently rates himself one out of three.