Today I am going to do something a bit different. The books I usually talk about here are ones that I am recommending to people to check out. Today I am going to talk about a few that I do not recommend and why they don’t pass muster. As a result, I am not going to be putting quite as much information about the books because they aren’t ones I really want people to seek out and buy. I want you to avoid them when you see them and books like them. I have mentioned them very briefly on the Facebook page, but I wanted to talk about them a little more here for a less ephemeral record.

The first book on the list is A Weekend with Dinosaurs. This book is put out by Raintree, an imprint of Capstone Global Library. This book came out in 2014 as part of their “Fantasy Science Field Trips” Read Me! series for elementary schools. They list it as reading level grades 1-3, but interest level grades 3-5, which I think kind of whacked, but that is just my personal opinion because dinosaurs are of interest to all ages in my (entirely biased, of course) opinion.

The book is written by Claire Throp and I must say up front that the atrociousness of this book is not entirely her fault. The words in the book are not terrible as far as they go. So let’s take a look at that first.It begins with going back in time 230 million years to begin the field trip at the beginning of the dinosaurs. It’s written in a fun and interesting way which is, I think, just right for the desired tone and age range of the audience. She sets it up well, even mentioning that different dinosaurs lived at different times over a very long period of time, so kudos.

The book then goes through each time period of the Mesozoic. They hit the Triassic first. Here I have a serious disagreement with the book. They mention a massive extinction at the beginning of the Triassic, although they don’t name it as the end Permian or PermoTriassic, which it is better known as, but they blame it on an asteroid, I expect in an effort to link it to the asteroid at the end of the Mesozoic. However, the most accepted hypothesis for the PermoTriassic extinction event is the eruption of the Siberian Traps, the most extensive volcanic event in the history of the planet, as the main cause, which is not even mentioned. Sure, let’s blame a big, sexy space rock and completely ignore what we think really happened.

Another error here is mentioning Syntarsus, which has been generally considered to be a junior synonym of Coelophysis since 2004, which is noted in Wikipedia, so that information is easily found. Syntarsus itself has not existed as a valid species name since at least 2002, so there is really no excuse for a book published in 2014 to be mentioning it.

Moving on to the Jurassic Period, they pick some interesting dinosaurs to represent the time, such as Dilophosaurus, which, despite what they say in the book, has only ever been found in the United States.There was a specimen from China, but in 2003, it was discovered that it was actually a different dinosaur named Sinosaurus. Again, this was over a decade before this book was printed. And while I am talking about times, the geologic time scales they show at the top of the pages, while a good idea, are wrong. It is not clear what ranges they are supposed to be representing, but none of them really match currently accepted dates.

The other dinosaurs they mention for the Jurassic are good, classic dinosaurs of the time and good inclusions. They list Megalosaurus as having lived in England and Africa which, while possible and at one time considered as such, is now considered just to be in England. It has long been considered a “wastebasket” taxon and more recent work has reclassified the megalosaurs on other continents to different genera. This is just another example of old, outdated information used in this book though, which is unacceptable in such a recent book.

The chapter on the Cretaceous Period has several interesting dinosaurs. It is mostly decent, although one small comment is that a lot of the dinosaurs would fit into an adult’s hand when newly born. Even the large sauropods weighing tens of tons as adults had eggs no bigger than the size of soccer balls, so the babies weren’t that big when freshly hatched. They just grew incredibly fast.

The book wraps up quickly with only two pages to cove the end of the dinosaurs. Oddly, they say nothing about what ended the dinosaurs. They make it sound as if pretty much everything died except for birds, when what they (I hope) meant was that all the dinosaurs except for birds died off, leaving room for the mammals to diversify into the prominent spots.

I do like the picture of the footprint listing it as a fossil, showing that not just bones are fossils. The book also has a glossary, an index, and additional reading with books listed and a website. Unfortunately, they only list their own stuff, for which they have already demonstrated a lack of fact checking, so when they say that “all the sites on FactHound have been researched by our staff,” that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

Ok, so a fair number of mistakes, but on the whole, not ones that would make me scream in agony. But the pictures! Oh the horrible pictures! It looks as if they spent a few minutes on the internet and took whatever pictures they could find. The pictures are so incredibly inconsistent, it is a crime against education.

There are a few that are good. I like the spinosaur picture. Of course, that picture was done by Walter Myers, an excellent artist who is listed nowhere in the credits. So Raintree, did you actually pay the man?

Sadly, right next to that picture is the most godawful picture of an oviraptor stealing eggs that would have been an embarrassment fifty years ago. There is a decent picture of Syntarsus, excuse me, Coelophysis, right next to a picture of Plateosaurus that was never accurate, another picture taken from a stock illustration collection with no regard for accuracy whatsoever. The Troodon just made me want to cry as it is possibly the worst I have ever seen. I am sure I have seen it before, but I don’t remember where other than it was in a book published before I was born. Pictures were taken from old books and movie stills, computer generated images, poor drawings, apparently any place they could grab them quickly. It is apparent no effort at all was made to see if the illustrations conveyed any sense of accuracy at all.

In fact, the illustrations in this book are so bad that it really doesn’t matter what the words say at all. This book was made with the apparent idea that the accuracy of the illustrations don’t matter because it is a children’s book. That is as far from the truth as it is possible to get. The artwork is the MOST important part of a children’s book. They will remember the artwork long after they have forgotten every single word in the book. The art has to be right. When the art is screwed up this badly, the words are almost pointless. Even with the mistakes in the the text, Claire Throp was done a disservice by having her work destroyed by the illustrations. It might be entertaining to a little kid, but no one who knows anything about dinosaurs will let their kids anywhere near this book except as a warning how NOT to draw dinosaurs. The only decent artwork in this book seems to be possibly pirated, so there is even that problem on top of everything else.

There is really no excuse for this. There are a lot of really excellent paleoartists who work really hard to make their work as scientifically accurate as they can while still turning out beautiful work. The art is there. The artists are there. Pay them and get quality work to make a quality product. The kids deserve that.

The second and third books I am just going to briefly mention. One is Scholastic’s book, Dinosaurs of the Jurassic World and Beyond. Written by Paula Hammond, this book came out in 2015 to capitalize on the release of Jurassic World. Of course, what they really did was have this book on prehistoric animals that had nothing to do with Jurassic World whatsoever, notice that hey, it has a tyrannosaur in it, let’s put Jurassic World in the title and hope nobody notices that we lied our asses off about this book having anything to do with the movie so that we can sell more copies. I guess adding “and Beyond” explains not mentioning the movie and including animals like Dunkleosteus, Dimetrodon, and the Woolly Mammoth.

This book also has several inaccuracies and has not exactly stellar artwork. While not as horrifyingly bad as in Weekend with Dinosaurs, it is not great. Broken wrists and unfeathered dinosaurs are common.

The other book is Dinosaur Bites, by Heather Dakota, published by Tangerine Press. This one uses as a selling point that it comes with a necklace, of what I forget, a bronze tooth I think. Again, this suffers the same problem of poor research and bad artwork. They seem to insist on getting people who, while reasonable artists, are not familiar with their subjects and it shows in their artwork. Either that, or their book designers force them to make bad artwork to satisfy some preconceived notions, which is entirely possible.

Here is a gripe that I have with a lot of these books. They seem to be written by people who had their ideas about dinosaurs and other extinct animals set decades ago and they have never changed. Moreover, they don’t think it matters that they haven’t bothered to update their thinking. So they put the same thing they think they remember from their childhood. Not saying they are, but that’s what it seems like. Take for example, good old Dimetrodon. He is listed as a mammal-like reptile. Unfortunately, scientists have not used that term, really, ever. They haven’t even colloquially used that term in decades because Dimetrodon and his kin are not related to modern reptiles at all. There was a group of reptile-like animals from which two groups emerged. One group diversified into what eventually became what we think of as reptiles, along with dinosaurs and birds. The other group became mammals. Dimetrodon is in the group that became mammals. So if we are going to call them anything like that, we should be calling them something like reptile-like protomammals. Or we could just call them what scientists call them: synapsids.

Why is this important? Because it causes people to look at them differently. Dimetrodon and his kin were not reptiles with some characteristics superficially like mammals. They were animals on their way to evolving into true mammals. And that is an enormous sea change in perspective. How we talk about these creatures makes a difference.