Which Dinosaur Documentaries Should You Let Your Kids Watch

Do you still remember Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park made into film by Steven Speilberg? It tells the story of genetically engineered dinosaurs placed on an island in South America called Jurassic Park. For some reason, the dinosaurs went wild and wrecked havoc on the island. The popularity of the film may be attributed to our fascination about dinosaurs, those reptiles that dominated the Earth many million years ago. In fact, many Dinosaur Documentaries have been filmed even before and many more after Jurassic Park. These documentaries are shown on TV and are also available in video formats, which can be used to educate kids as the origin and extinction of these humongous creatures.

Documentaries are ideal education tools for kids so that early on in their lives, they will be well aware of the nature and history of dinosaurs. You can find the Best Dinosaur Documentaries online or buy them in your local DVD stores. Look for the Ultimate Dinosaur Collection released by BBC Video in 2007, which features three discs containing videos titled "Before the Dinosaurs: Walking with Monsters," "Walking with Dinosaurs," "Allosaurs," "Chased by Dinosaurs," and "Trilogy of Life: The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs, Beasts, and Monsters." Meanwhile, Discovery Channel's Discovery Essential Dinosaur Pack, released in 2008, contains seven of the most popular dinosaur documentaries of the said channel. As with the first one, it uses computer-generated animation of dinosaurs. Another popular dinosaur documentary is Prehistoric Earth: Natural History, released in 2008 by BBC Video.

For a selection of more kid-friendly videos, meaning for younger audience, check out Sesame Street: Dinosaurs!, and National Geographic: Really Wild Animals. The Sesame Street version is a great way to introduce dinosaurs to kids since popular characters like Elmo explore the dinosaur world in a very imaginative manner in the videos. In the National Geographic video, aside from dinosaurs, creepy crawlers, bats, and insects are also explored. It is very entertaining to watch the video because it is accompanied by rock music and uses a lot of humor to remove the scary aspect of dinosaurs. All dinosaur documentaries are very good sources of information about these prehistoric creatures. Parents are however advised to read reviews first because there are videos that are not very accurate when depicting the dinosaurs, there are also videos that may be too complicated for children to understand. Make sure that the documentaries that you will get for your kids are appropriate for their ages so that they can easily understand their contents.

John is a Civil Engineer for the State of Connecticut, an avid Dinosaur enthusiast, and currently has a blog at dinosaur-documentaries.com.