When a mysterious stone falls from the sky, Riku is swept into a wild, time-traveling adventure with Stella, an alien explorer, and a crew of his classmates. Armed with a magical Quest Book, they travel back to the age of dinosaurs—diving deep into prehistoric oceans, encountering towering sauropods, and even hatching a dinosaur egg! With real science woven into every chapter and sidebars that explain the fascinating world of paleontology, Dinosaur Adventures is both an edge-of-your-seat manga journey and a crash course in dinosaur discovery.

Manga Quest Science: Dinosaur Adventures has a story and art by Satomi Momota. English translation is done by David Bove and lettering by Vibrant Publishing Studio. Published by Tokyopop (March 24, 2026). Rated 10+.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

Manga Quest, a new imprint from Tokyopop is a collaborates with Japanese educational publisher Gakken, to harness the popularity of manga with standards-driven educational material. With a intended reading audience of 10 and up, Science Adventures with Dinosaurs is a bit like being dragged along on a elementary school field trip and learning a bunch of cool new stuff along with the children.

The book begins with a short intro to our characters, and a quick jump into why and how Stella, Riku and friends end up in the Cretaceous Age. They discover different kinds of dinosaurs, how they eat and fight and raise offspring. The human characters are consistently human, and end up riding more docile herbivores and running from the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex, even after befriending one of her babies.

The art gives the whole story a Digimon-feel and the characters definitely lean into that vibe. Facts about dinosaurs, fossils and related topics are dropped conversationally, through a little hand-held device, and in textual commentary. The text ranges from key takeaways to random factoids, to short essays on cool topics like ammonites, or tectonic drift. I found the way these textual inserts reinforced the information we'd gotten from the story useful and, even more importantly, allowed readers of different levels to learn from the book. I could easily see assigning this book to a group of students and asking each one to talk about elements they found the most interesting and useful, and expecting a pretty huge range of learning from them in return.

Not every kid goes through a dinosaur phase, but if you know of a kid right about in the beginning of that phase, Manga Quest: Science Adventures with Dinosaurs is a great entrée into the various sciences of evolution, biology, history, archaeology and more.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Not all kids go through a dinosaur phase, but in my experience, more do than don't. If you've got an elementary schooler busy telling you the difference between stegosaurus and brontosaurus, then this just might be the book for them – it's a fun mesh of fact and fiction, filled with kids on an adventure to the last days of the dinosaurs with pages reminiscent of old Ranger Rick magazines to provide background information for the more deeply invested reader.

The plot itself is simple: Riku is procrastinating doing his homework when Stella, an alien being, pops into his bedroom. Stella has a magic book that she uses to take Riku back to the time of the dinosaurs, and when his friends Kirara and Ginga show up to visit, they fall into the book, too. Stella has chosen the dinosaurs because her father sent her on a mission to discover the origins of a fossilized dino egg, and the kids all try to find its mother once it hatches before going back to modern times.

It's a relatively harmless story, but more sensitive readers will need to have an adult to talk about things with, and I'd be lying if I said that being part of The Land Before Time generation didn't make parts of this feel particularly sad and scary. Riku and his friends do learn a lot about different types of dinosaurs and that T-Rexes are now thought to have had feathers, but they also witness the meteor that killed them and see a scene of the babies of a dead mother trying to survive. There's some dino-sparring and peril as well, but this is less upsetting. Everything is backed up with facts for the most part, though, so there is a clear explanation for what the kids witness, which may help.

Overall this is a solid, if imperfectly balanced, book. It'd be great in a classroom or school library, and if you have a reluctant reader who's in their dinosaur phase, definitely check it out.