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This book is part of an educational series involving Detective Conan in an effort to teach kids about various subjects, this one of course being dinosaurs! The book is split into two main sections--the comic portion, where we follow Conan and the Detective Kids on a mystery at an upcoming dinosaur museum, and the educational-focused portion, where we get deep dives into various facts about dinosaurs.
There is only one story for the comic portion, where the kids stumble upon what appears to be a fossil, which takes them to the nearby museum, where they conveniently show up just as Richard does to help solve a case, giving them early access to the museum. Someone is tampering with the exhibits! As Conan starts to look further and pick up more clues, other darker mysteries appear. Can Conan solve the case in time before it's too late?
The educational portions were interesting and cute. I loved the artwork included, and each section (minus the last one) includes a mini quiz designed to get kids to engage more with what they've just learned. (The answers are written in detail at the back of the book.) While I've never been a big dino-nerd, it did get me curious to know more. The book discusses different types of dinosaurs, different time periods, anatomy, life-habits, various theories, historical discovery info, archeology, their destruction, and modern "dinosaurs". It's a little older, so a touch out of date, but still has plenty of relevant (to my knowledge) info.
One critique I'd give is the color choices. The orange accent color in general was fine (and was neat to see while reading the comic portions), but having it on top of backgrounds of almost the same value made it so difficult to read. Luckily there wasn't much of this, but I don't know how that got approved to final printing. I still managed to read everything, I'm not that old yet, haha, just wish they added a stroke or something to separate it from the background.
One thing I really liked though was how the comic reinforced what you read in the educational portions. Well, you know, to an extent, haha. But that the two had a bit of overlap was neat. Like the kids being taught and using their dino knowledge to help with the case.
And goodness, what an ending ;)
Cute book, cute series idea. I liked it :)
For Japanese Learners:
I would say this book is harder than the typical Conan books, mostly due to the info dumps and more rarer vocabulary (unless you're already learning quite a bit about dinosaurs, fossils, archeological digs, evolution, etc. haha).