Children's Show review: So You Think You Know About DInosaurs? With Dr Ben Garrod, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh

Dinosaurs were simple beasts when I was growing up (are they beasts? – ed).

Get your T-Rex facts in order with the help of Dr Garrod

So You Think You Know About DInosaurs? With Dr Ben Garrod, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh * * * *

There were half a dozen of them, and those evil-minded velociraptors hadn’t been invented. Now there’s so many it’s a kind of dinosaurs Mastermind, as was amply proved in Dr Ben Garrod’s show, where one or two mid-sized boys in the audience were sickeningly quick with answers. Of course I knew it was a Patagotitan mayorum…

Dr Garrod bills himself as the Don of Dinosaurs. He’s an English evolutionary biologist, primatologist and broadcaster, who has presented television shows including ‘Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur’ with Sir David Attenborough, of whom he has several proud snaps.

This is Dr Garrod’s first Fringe show. He kicked off slightly oddly with jokes about Norfolk – very flat though it is – but when he got into the swing the fidget factor dropped to zero. The show captures the changing picture of dinosaurs on the front edge of research, as scientists dig up ever more bones and knowledge: dear old Tyrannosaurus Rex, for one, has had a shocking make-over recently in skin, stance and voice.

Dinosaurs are all around us to this day, but not Nessie, because she wasn’t one. New species are discovered every week (as the real class dunce, I wanted a recap of just what a species is). They lived for 180 million years, in all kinds of shapes and sizes. There’s a lot of shows on the Fringe this year, of course, suggesting our own great extinction is coming vastly sooner.

Until 17 August

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