Dinosaur Pop-Up ABC

This book follows a seemingly foolproof recipe: take one popular genre, add 26 surefire kid-pleasing critters (one for each letter of the alphabet), stir in a generous amount of paper engineering and serve to a Jurassic-bred--not to be confused with white-bread--audience. Though there may be little new news to report about these prehistoric pals, Maguire's brief descriptions include some intriguing factoids: the iguanodon had ``only a bony beak at the front of its jaw'' and no teeth; the fabrosaurus ``would have been too short to reach up to a dining room table''; the jaxartosaurus was named after the Russian river where its fossils were found. Generally presenting four of these antediluvian, abecedarian animals per spread, Mirocha's standard-issue depictions are effectively frightening. For a less realistic but cheerier dino ABC pop-up, see Jan Pienkowski's ABC Dinosaurs (1993). Ages 4-8. (May)