* This is (I think) the first time Extinct has discussed a children’s book. But this post isn’t just a picture book recommendation. It’s also a reflection on how we communicate the nature of science to little kids. Most books that attempt to do this fumble it badly. The Iguanodon’s Horn, by contrast, absolutely nails it. Read on to find out how. Max Dresow writes…
In addition to a niche academic weblogist, I’m also the father of two small kids. Both my kids love to read, and I love reading to them. So we read. And we read. And we read. And then we read some more.
As it happens, my oldest, Smith, caught the dinosaur bug. This took place right under my nose, and in spite of my effort to shield him from the typhoon of dinosaur stuff that swirls, unbidden, around every child. (Seriously. Try keeping dinosaurs special for your kids. I’m sure it’s possible, but it’s a tough grind now that dinosaurs have been domesticated for every commercial purpose under the sun.)
Say— has anyone seen my dinosaur-with-a-basketball kid’s digital camera?
Anyway, we’ve been hitting the dinosaur books hard lately, which for us means one of two kinds of book. Either it means board books that feature dinosaur characters for no apparent reason. (These usually suck, unless they’re written by Sandra Boyton.) Or it means mini-encyclopedias: books that contain galleries of dinosaurs together with informational “placards.” Most of these are fine, I guess, even if on the whole they tend to be pretty derivative. But for books that pose as “science” books, they tend to tend to be empty calories as far as the science is concerned. Like, how do we know that “Tyrannosaurus rex weighed 6.8 metric tons”? No one has ever put a T. rex on a scale. Where did this figure come from? Also, which rexes weighed this much? The biggest ones? The males? The females? How do you even estimate what the biggest rex might have weighed based on the small number of skeletons available?
For that matter, why did we used to think that sauropods needed to live in swamps to support their massive bodies? This was once a “fact” proudly trumpeted in all dinosaur books. One of my childhood favorites, Dinosaur Time, showed a Brachiosaurus vegetating in a swamp because it was “too fat to run from enemies.” But no modern book would say this— why not? What changed? These are questions that most children’s books don’t even pose, probably because they think they can’t be intelligibly put to a young audience.
A two-page spread from Dinosaur Time by Peggy Parish (with illustrations by Arnold Lobel)
Imagine my joy, then, to discover a book that deftly illustrates the basic dynamic of paleontological interpretation with marvelous illustrations and more historical sophistication than even its adult readers will appreciate. It’s called The Iguanodon’s Horn, and its author is Sean Rubin, whose previous books include Bolivar and This Very Tree. I love this book. In fact, I love it so much that I’ve developed the annoying habit of explaining why its so good to anyone who will listen. This is clearly appalling behavior and I’m going to cut it out just as soon as I finish this post. So this is me getting it out of my system.
Why is The Iguanodon’s Horn so good? It begins with its picture of science. “Science is a process,” Rubin explains. “When humans do science, they create theories— sets of ideas about how the world works. Sometimes the ideas are right. Sometimes they are only part right. And sometimes the ideas seem right— even when they’re actually wrong.” I would say “models” instead of “theories,” but who cares— this is a splendid way to introduce the very idea of science.
From the prologue. Notice how brilliant Rubin’s illustrations are. They’re also packed with interesting details. For example: the character on the left is a composite of Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt. Like Darwin, he is making observations on marine iguanas. Like Humboldt, he’s wearing a trim little vest and a dope hat. The girl on the right is (inspired by?) Mary Anning. Anning famously had a spaniel (Tray) like the one pictured here. And in 1811 she and her brother made their first big fossil find: an ichthyosaur. But she also had dark hair, so perhaps this is another less-than-completely-literal representation. (FYI: the birth of geology is dated to 1785 because this is when James Hutton’s theory of the Earth was first presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.)
Science is a way of learning about the world. But just as important, it is a human activity. It is humans who do science, and humans are riddled with biases and preconceptions; hopes and fears; anxieties and quirks. All these factors shape the science that people do in particular times and places without rigidly determining it. Rubin understands this, and it’s the single biggest reason why The Iguanodon’s Horn kicks so much ass.
Rubin also understands that science progresses as much through failure as through success. Certainly this is true of dinosuar paleontology. So his story, when it gets going, is largely a story of (triumphant) failure. Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell reconstruct Iguanodon as a sixty foot-long iguana. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins reconstructs it as a beefy reptile with a mammalian carriage. Louis Dollo reconstructs it as a giant reptilian wallaby. Later paleontologists reconstruct it as an animal that preferred a horizontal posture and held its tail aloft. Most of these views are wrong, and some are— with the benefit of hindsight— egregiously wrong. Yet The Iguanodon’s Horn avoids treating failures as objects of ridicule, or even as mere slips. Instead, Rubin presents them as bold and creative imaginative achievements, thoroughly explicable in terms of the resources available to their authors, and— implicitly but crucially— as ladders that later scientists mount to construct more adequate models. True, Rubin puts some expressions of incredulity in the mouths of his iguanodons. (I never read the speech bubbles, but that is just because it disrupts the otherwise admirable flow of the book.) But the main text is always sympathetic to its historical actors. Even the Mantells— most egregiously wrong by present standards— are praised for getting certain things right, and for generally erring in reasonable ways.*
[* As a sidebar, the first thing I wrote for this site, a full two years ago, used the story of Iguanodon to illustrate a point about the nature of comparative reasoning in paleontology. There I related how Gideon Mantell estimated the length of Iguanodon to be first sixty, later a hundred feet! (It’s now thought to have grown to about 35 feet.)]
Louis Dollo inspects a new Iguanodon mount while his assistants puzzle over mounted skeletons of a wallaby and an emu
The book is chronologically organized, which enables Rubin to let the process of science unfold before your (children’s) eyes. The illustrations brilliantly whisk you along, like a river that spills from one page onto the next. In this way, the pages merge into a kind of historical panorama, which entices you to move on even as the eye lingers on so many wonderful details. (So, one page shows a ladder descending into the earth in the lower right-hand corner; the next the belly of a mine.) The book only wobbles in the section on the dinosaur renaissance. Now, this is by no means bad— in some ways, Rubin’s treatment of this episode is quite good. But the heroes of his story are John Ostrom and Bob Bakker: obvious choices if this were a general history of dinosaur paleontology; but these guys didn’t have anything to do with the reinterpretation of iguanodon. This was David Norton’s work and Norton goes unacknowledged. It’s a missed opportunity to highlight the contributions of a less celebrated figure than the other paleontologists and artists Rubin discusses. Still, Rubin redeems himself with an absolutely spot-on illustration of “the renaissance iguanodon.” The following image could have been taken from the Great Dinosaur Atlas I endlessly perused as a six-year old.
Iguanodons as they looked when I was a kid: or, a parade of beige and beige-y green
The whole thing, as I’ve indicated, is very well done. Even the discussion of “shrink wrapped” dinosaurs interested my three-year old. To explain the basic idea, Rubin imagines what a Gregory Paul-style reconstruction of a hippopotamus might look like based on a skull and nothing else. It’s a monstrosity, of course, because animals aren’t just skin and bones. They’re also (as Rubin says) curves and flesh and hair and dangle-y bits. It’s a succinct way of putting an important point, and it illustrates the continuing role that artistic decisions play in shaping our image of dinosaurs. Try as we might, we can’t escape the fact that paleontological reconstruction is a creative activity. Everyone knows that artists have to “fill in the blanks” when it comes to dinosaur reconstructions; but it is more than that— even the basic contours of our reconstructions are, within limits, a matter of artistic choice.
A shrink-wrapped Iguanodon
Now, earlier I dinged Rubin for some historical omissions in his treatment of the dinosaur renaissance. But I’m happy to report that there are some wonderfully deep historical cuts as well. The image below is a composite of several “scenes from deep time,” to use Martin Rudwick’s expression. In the foreground, we have Iguanodon, nose horn firmly in place, tussling with Megalosaurus. This is adopted more or less faithfully from John Martin’s endlessly copied watercolor, “The Country of the Iguanodon” (1837). Behind, a big-eyed plesiosaur arches its long neck. I’m not sure if this came from anywhere in particular, but this kind of image was ubiquitous in early paleoart; Martin’s “The Sea-Dragons as They Lived” (1840) features a fork-tongued plesiosaur doing its best impression of a swan. Likewise his “Age of Reptiles” (1843). Later, the frontispiece of W. F. Volliner’s Wonder of the Primitive World (1855) featured a similar creature. (Early paleoart was nothing if not derivative!) The pterosaurs remind one of a dozen “scenes from deep time,” including Hawkins’s “Dinosauria, or Gigantic Lizards, and Pterosauria… (c. 1862). The red sun, obscured by clouds, reminds one of Martin. Even the large tree bending slightly over the water nods to the most famous bit of paleoart ever: Henry de la Beche’s Duria antiquior. It is perhaps slightly misleading to position Hawkins as the painter of the scene; still, the details are wonderful, and merge seamlessly into a nifty homage to early deep time representations.
Rubin’s introduction to “the first paleoartists… [like] Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.” Below are some of the artworks that (probably) inspired Rubin’s illustration. Click on these to expand
And speaking of Hawkins: what iguanodon book could omit the sculptures produced for the Crystal Palace exhibition? This is by now a well-know bit of history; who can resist the image of a dinner party held within the mold of an iguanodon sculpture? But familiar or not, Rubin’s illustrations pop, and even manage incorporate a villainous Richard Owen sneering over Hawkins’s shoulder. (In fact, it seems that Owen had little to do with the Crystal Palace dinosaurs and may even have held the entire project in contempt; but this is all the more reason to draw him as kind of an asshole.)
Very fun! And notice the door opening onto the completed exhibition (right). This is a good example of how Rubin’s images flow seamlessly into one another and keep the reader eagerly flipping pages. (If you look at the previous image, you’ll see the rest of the procession of waiters)
I could keep gushing about this book— believe me, I’ve done it! But I’ll stop, and leave you with Rubin’s All Yesterdays-inspired tribute to contemporary paleoart.
(In my best Matthew Broderick voice:) You’re still here? It’s over. Go get a copy of The Iguanodon’s Horn!
Your kids will thank you when they grow up to be paleontologists. Or at least, you know, scientifically literate.
