Books from my Basement (part one)
Happy New Year everyone! 2024 has fully begun, and admittedly i'm just waiting for it to end already. But that's not what we're here to discuss. Rather, we are doing something more fun and upbeat: looking at childhood memories!
Tyrannosaurus Rex and Other Dinosaur Wonders
We start off with this book by children's author Q.L. Pearce. Dinosaur Wonders was published by Julian Messner in 1990 as part of a larger series on nature and science (you can see the title in the picture). I attained it by borrowing it from Middle School when I attended it back around 2012 or so (... yeah, by all means I've stolen it. Sorry Robert J. Lee). Dinosaur Wonders consists of portraits on the left pages depicting dinosaurs, with information on the other side. The contents of the book itself are an overview of each dinosaur group and a few others, as well as aspects of their biology and palaeontology.
The book's art by Mary Ann Fraser is pretty good, having a painterly art style with large brush strokes that's both cartoony and nice to look at, especially the backgrounds. The colours and designs of the dinosaurs are also nice to me, even the more garish ones (like the pink Gallimimus you see above). They alternately convey dynamic and active creatures people living through the Dinosaur Renaissance were starting to see them as. The anatomy is occasionally iffy, I admit however.
Meanwhile, the information, relayed opposite each illustration, is standard for the Dinosaur Renaissance. Birds might be dinosaur descendants (but Archeopteryx is a bird thank you very much)! Endothermy Vs. Ecothermy! Unfeathered theropods and elephantine feet! Baryonyx, all the rage in palaeo-books in the 80's and 90's! Plus, there is the cladogram at the start of the book, which starts with a mention of the now invalid thecodonts at the top and has Tyrannosaurus separate from the Coelurosaurs (which just a few years and a decade afterward was proven to be false).
There are plenty of inaccuracies for the time not just in the designs. Just one example is that the book suggests sauropods were only really thriving in the then-island continent of South America because hadrosaurs never reached it was already wrong at the time of publication, because not only were hadrosaurs had been known from there since the 1970's (Brett-Surman 1979) yet still co-existed with sauropods, but while it was only being discovered at the time after the book was published, sauropods are known from the Late Cretaceous on every continent. But even then, these don't detract from any enjoyment of Dinosaur Wonders.
The text of the book is also nice. While it refrains from any attempt at jokes or a casual/comic tone, there is a sense of warm reverence in the text as the information about dinosaurs is relayed, indeed putting the wonder in. It's stately and gives the basics on their subject pretty well.
Also apparently, the credited consultant for the book is one Peggy Keyser from the Skirball Museum in LA... which is a Jewish cultural museum, not a natural history or science museum. Not sure how that happened or why she was consulted. Maybe she was the science professor there? Or was there some other Skirball everyone forgot about?
The species selection meanwhile is a standard array for the time. You have T. rex and Triceratops, Brachio, Parasaurolophus, Deinonychus, even the old boxy-headed Spinosaurus; you also have creatures popular to show in the 90's but not seen often these days, like the early dinosauriform Saltopus (thought to be a dinosaur itself at the time), the sauropod Saltasaurus (treated as the last sauropod as many did), and the hairy pterosaur Sordes. Just about the only outlier for me would be using Kentrosaurus instead of Stegosaurus for the plate (heh heh) on the stegosaurs.
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| Final note: I like this art spread in particular, as after forgetting the book for a decade I first remembered these Triceratops and snakes. Although since no Maastrichtian snake of the Americas could likely harm even a baby Triceratops, so I like to see it as some Trikes investigating a passing but harmless snake. |
Tyrannosaurus Rex and Other Dinosaur Wonders is a pretty good little slice of the Dinosaur Renaissance. Both the artwork and information are very good, even for their time, and have likewise aged fine, though not without slip ups or decay in the timeless department here and there. No wonder 11-year old me was hooked.
- Accuracy - 6/10
- Aging - 5/10
- Artwork - 8/10
- Layout - 8/10
- Information - 6/10
- Species Selection - 8/10
- Rereadability - 8/10
Scientific Dictionary of Dinosaurs
The Scientific Dictionary of Dinosaurs, by James Richardson, first published in 1992 (but the edition I own was published in 2001), is similarly part of a larger series on natural science words and their definitions. I'm not sure how I acquired it, so don't ask me about it.
My first comment is that the illustrations are atrocious. The art by Kaye Quinn are all blobby, shapeless designs that are just one colour with only some shading, many of them traced from other sources. Just look at the Dryptosaurus and Daspletosaurus below, blatantly copying from Knight and Eleanor Kish respectively. Every creature looks like a cheap chinasaur toy, and while some may find it charming, I don't really have much outside mocking how it gets so much wrong, or that its at least technically original. But even then, just as people like me hate seeing any artwork blatantly traced over or copying Jurassic World renders or even using them, so I hate it here too. Plus, it just dates the book all the more to the era when most people still thought dinosaurs were like depictions before the 70's.
The information meanwhile, being a dictionary, is rather basic, consisting of short paragraphs. I admit most of them are so basic they do age well or refrain from any serious inaccuracies or ageing, but there are still moments that remind you the dictionary was written before Jurassic Park (the movie) was released. On the other hand, the format does give it a fairly wide list of genera beyond the stock A-listers; besides the aforementioned Drypto, you have dinos like Efraasia and Carcharodontosaurus. You also have taxa like Fabrosaurus, which were seemingly in every dinosaur book in the 90's, mostly as "the one that starts with the letter F", but rarely are seen in books from the 2000's onward.
The Scientific Dictionary of Dinosaurs isn't very good nor memorable, because its well, a dictionary. It's the kind of book you only whip out on occasion to thumb through for your definitions, not read through in sittings. The art and species selection are easily the most notable thing about it, but not much else is there. Granted, coming after the vastly different book that is Dinosaur Wonders my expectations may have been a bit warped. At best the dictionary's fine for what it is, a cheap thing put out for kids and with little substance for anyone older. The scientific dictionary is just one of many paperbacks published in the 80's and 90's that would reside on libraries or kid's bedroom shelves but are noe only remembered. I however feel no nostalgic feelings to it. The Scientific Dictionary will likely be forgotten save those who still own the book or put/seen it on Internet Archive.
- Accuracy - 5/10
- Aging - 5/10
- Artwork - 4/10
- Layout - 6/10
- Information - 6/10
- Species Selection - 7/10
- Rereadability - 4/10
Thank you for reading this blog post. The other two books I have will be covered in time, though they aren't a priority for me right now.
Sources/See Also
- Learning About Dinosaurs Collection: A Palaeoart Horrorshow
- Holtz, Thomas R. Jr. (1994). "The phylogenetic position of the Tyrannosauridae: implications for theropod systematics". Journal of Paleontology. 68 (5): 1100–1117. doi:10.1017/S0022336000026706. JSTOR 1306180. S2CID 129684676.
- Brett-Surman, M. K. (1979-12-15). "Phylogeny and palaeobiogeography of hadrosaurian dinosaurs". Nature. 277 (5697): 560–562. doi:10.1038/277560a0. ISSN 0028-0836. S2CID 4332144.
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