YA/childrens - video/computer game used to accidentally time travel to meet dinosaurs

[[deleted user]]

I'm hoping someone could help me find a book from my childhood. The protagonist is a young boy who gets given a video game that accidentally allows him to travel back to a time when dinosaurs are alive. He bonds in particular with a mother-child pair of Diplodocus (or another sauropod species) and it ends with him trying to save them from a volcanic eruption (possibly a meteor/asteroid strike).. During the venture, the mother Diplodocus uses her tail as a bridge over lava, getting burned in the process. Back in the present, he goes to a museum and finds the fossilised skeletons of the pair, and he knows it is the mother because of the char marks on her tail bones. He also knows they survived the disaster in some sort of protected cave.

I have been trawling google for this with no success whatsover, so I hope someone here can help! I remember reading this in a British library in the early 2000s, so at least that old, and it was filed in young adult/teen fiction. Any help would be appreciated!

[Kris]

OP (original poster) account is deleted. Moving to the "Now we'll never know" folder.