What Buttosaur is That?

Andy Griffiths' What Buttosaur is That? is a spoof natural history guide for 8 year olds in which every creature that ever lived was a bottom.

What happens

It is laid out exactly like a real reference book, and that is most of the fun. There's a straight-faced introduction explaining that life began with primitive bumteria in the Pre-Crappian era, 600 million years ago, and that these slowly bumvolved into more complex forms.

Then come the sections. Invertebutts. Bumfish. Bumphibians and stenchtiles. Farthropods and stinksects. Bumornithids. Bummals.

Every creature gets a short entry and a box of vital statistics, with a scientific name, a family, a diet, the period it lived in and a stink rating.

The Bum-sponge sat on the sea floor absorbing bumteria. It had no arms, no legs, no mouth, no internal organs, no nervous system, no personality and no hobbies or interests of any kind, so it took up making bubbles to relieve the boredom of its very dull life.

The Sea scorpibum's claws could cut a Trilobutt in half. It also went in for elegant courtship dancing, which over millions of years branched out into bumroom dancing, bum-ballet, stench-jazz and stink-hop.

This is a browsing book rather than a sit-down-and-read-it book. Your reader can open it anywhere, take in two entries, snort, and put it down again. That makes it very good for a child who won't settle to a chapter, and for the sort who reads bits out to you whether you asked or not.

Be warned that it isn't only bums. Arse turns up constantly, in the creature names and in the invented diets. If that's a word you would rather not hear at the table for the next month, give this one a miss. If you lost that battle a while ago, your reader will be thrilled.

One oddity. The title here says Buttosaur, and the text calls them bumosaurs all the way through. Same book, same jokes, rude word swapped between editions.

What to read next

If a story suits them better than a list, Zombie Bums from Uranus opens with a boy skiing down a mountain while arguing with his own bum about whether they are going home.