Illustrated by Ed Eaves

Five dreaming dinosaurs,
snoring in their sleep.
I wonder what they're dreaming of.
Let's go take a peep ...

From secret agent to soccer superstar,
meet five dozing dinosaurs
with dazzling dreams in this
rocking, rhyming pop-up book.

Simon & Schuster Children's Books

UK Hardcover • ISBN-10: 1847388094 • ISBN-13: 9781847388094

Click here for details of foreign language editions

Illustrations © 2011 Ed Eaves. Reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster Children's Books,

Tyrannosaurus Rocks! was created as a follow-up to Pirate Pussycat but has a slightly different concept. While Pirate Pussycat features five apparently ordinary cats who had extraordinary secret lives, Tyrannosaurus Rocks! features five dinosaurs who have extraordinary dreams.

When I was writing the poems for the book, I tried to give each dinosaur a dream that would work with their distinctive characteristics. So the fierce formidable tyrannosaur dreams of becoming a loud, stomping rock guitarist, and the speedy velociraptor dreams of tearing up the soccer pitch to score a goal. The other major consideration was that whatever character and activity I chose would have to make a good moving pop-up!

The original version of the book included a stegosaurus princess and an apatosaurus ballerina.

Pirate Pussycat was meant to appeal as much to girls as boys and this had originally been the intention with Tyrannosaurus Rocks! So in its early stages the book had included a stegosaurus princess and an apatosaurus ballerina. However it was subsequently decided to concentrate on the book’s boy appeal, so the break-dancer and spy were substituted for these two pops.

Once I'd finished the paper-engineering, Ed Eaves began work on the illustrations. Although Ed had hand-painted the illustrations for Pirate Pussycat, he did the illustrations for this book on an Apple Mac. This made it a lot quicker and easier to integrate the artwork with my paper-engineering which was also done on a Mac.

I love the detail that Ed has put into the background spreads. My favourite is probably the band he’s created to accompany the tyrannosaur. They really look like they are rocking out!