Gifts for kids who are obsessed with dinosaurs

You know the phase. A four-year-old who can't tie a shoe will correct you, kindly but firmly, that it's not a Brontosaurus, it's an Apatosaurus. (Or he'll tell you Brontosaurus is back, because paleontologists revived the name in 2015.) Dinosaur kids aren't hard to shop for. The trick is finding gifts that feed the obsession instead of adding another bin of plastic to the playroom floor.

Books, by stage

Books are the safest dinosaur gift there is, because a dinosaur kid will read the same one until the spine gives out. A few that have earned their place on a lot of shelves:

• Ages 2 to 5: How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague. A bedtime book disguised as a dinosaur book. Parents can read it without losing their minds on the fortieth night, which matters.
• Ages 4 to 8: National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs by Catherine D. Hughes. Big pictures, short facts, and the pronunciation guide you'll need when they ask you to say Pachycephalosaurus.
• Ages 6 to 9: Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborne, the first Magic Tree House book. For a new reader, a chapter book about dinosaurs is the bridge from being read to to reading.
• Ages 8 and up: a proper visual encyclopedia. DK and National Geographic both make thick, photo-heavy dinosaur references. Older kids want the real names, the dates and the skeleton diagrams, and they'll check your facts against it.

Before you buy, borrow a couple from the library and see which style sticks. Some kids want stories, some want facts and nothing else.

Figures and kits that hold up

A good set of figures gets played with for years, while cheap ones snap in a week. Schleich dinosaurs are the ones you see in a lot of playrooms for a reason: detailed, solid enough for the bathtub and the sandbox, and sold one at a time, so they make easy add-on gifts for birthdays. Buying one good T. rex beats buying a bucket of fifty tiny ones that end up in the vacuum.

Fossil dig kits are the other classic. You get a block of plaster with replica or real small fossils inside, plus a little chisel and brush. Kids love them. Parents should know two things: the plaster dust gets everywhere, so do it outside or on an old towel, and the bigger kits are usually labeled for ages 8 and up for good reason. For a five-year-old, a smaller kit and a grown-up holding the block works better than handing over the mega version and walking away.

A museum trip is the best dinosaur gift

Seeing a real skeleton the height of a house does something no toy can. If one of these is within a day's drive, consider wrapping up the trip itself: the tickets, a printed map with the route, and a promise to let them set the pace.

• Field Museum, Chicago. Home of SUE, a 40-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex the museum describes as about 90 percent complete, in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet, which are included with general admission.
• American Museum of Natural History, New York. The fourth-floor fossil halls, where a 122-foot cast of a titanosaur stretches its neck toward the elevators. It's hard to describe the scale until you're standing under it.
• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. The fossil hall that reopened in 2019 puts the Nation's T. rex in the middle of the room, posed tearing into a Triceratops. Smithsonian museums are free, which makes this one easy to visit twice.
• Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh. Its Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition has more than 230 specimens, and the museum says about 75 percent are original fossils rather than casts. A good one for the kid who asks "but is it real?"
• Dinosaur National Monument, Utah and Colorado. For the family road trip. Inside the Quarry Exhibit Hall, more than 1,500 dinosaur bones are still in the rock face where they were found. Ask at the visitor center about the Junior Ranger program, which gives kids a booklet of activities and a badge at the end.

Hours, tickets and which halls are open change, so check each museum's site before you promise a date. If you live near one, a family membership often pays for itself in two visits and turns a single trip into a year of them.

Dinosaurs for their wall

Dinosaur kids usually want their room to say so. Our kids' room wall decor ideas cover the options, from posters and maps to the bigger pieces. Ours is a portrait where your child is in the scene: Dino Rider puts your kid and your dog or cat on a dinosaur's back in the jungle, and Triceratops Explorer is the one-child version, no pet required. You can preview either one with a photo in about 20 seconds, free, before deciding anything.

Dino stuff we'd leave on the shelf

• The giant roaring animatronic dinosaur. It's thrilling for a day, then it lives in the corner, and the batteries run out at 6 a.m.
• Dinosaur everything. Sheets, lamp, toothbrush, cups. One or two dinosaur things in a room lasts longer than a theme, and the phase may turn into rocks, space or sharks next year.
• Screens as the main gift. There's good dinosaur TV, and they'll find it. The gifts they remember are the ones they handled. Our list of screen-free gifts has more ideas in that direction.

One last thought. Plenty of dinosaur kids move on, but some of them grow into the kid who wants a rock hammer, then a geology class, then a college major. If you're decorating, it helps to plan a room that grows with them, so the next obsession has somewhere to go.