Book Review: Secret Stories of Lost Beasts

June 30, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

There are plenty of animals that used to exist on Earth that seem like they aren’t real, but they once were. Kids who love dinosaurs and other ancient creatures will enjoy Secret Stories of Lost Beasts: A Field Guide to Uncover Earth’s Ancient Animals by Sasika Gwinn, illustrated by Vasillia Romanenko.

The book is designed like a field guide showing different extinct animals with detailed illustrations and a paragraph about each one. Here you’ll find:

amphibians
reptiles
dinosaurs
sea beasts
mammals
Ice Age mammals
bugs
birds

Readers will learn about animals like beezlebufo, or the devil frog, who lived alongside dinosaurs and may have been the heaviest frog who ever lived; staganolepis, a plant-eating, bony scaled reptile with a tail like a crocodile and a snout like a pig; mamenchisaurus, thought to have the longest neck of any dinosaur; the Tully monster, a creature so confusing scientists aren’t sure was a vertebrate or invertebrate; juramaia, the oldest known mammal ancestor that gave birth to live young; glytopdons, which looked like giant armadillos; animals of the Bering land bridge like woolly mammoth, Irish elk and giant sloths; the giant dragonfly meganeura monyi; birds with teeth like the woodpecker-like enanttiophoenix; big birds like the giant auk and Tasmanian emu; among many others.

Additional text includes information on things like the giant asteroid, carboniferous forests, the time period known as the great dying, and more.

In the back of the book you’ll find a timeline for these creatures and more recently lost animals, as well as a few endangered species like the deer-like silver-backed chevrotain.

Kids who love animals, especially dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals that are extinct, are sure to enjoy looking at the pictures in this book and learning more about these strange animals that seem like something out of legend. If you want to see if your dino-loving kid’s interests can expand to other animals, this might just be the book to do it.

About the book: 64 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Wide Eyed Editions. Suggested retail price $24.99.

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Learning Activities with Snap Cubes

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

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