Life Story
- Eric Maddern &
- Leo Duff
The Story of Everything
- Neal Layton
The Pebble In My Pocket
- Meredith Hooper &
- Chris Coady
Ask Dr K Fisher about Dinosaurs
- Claire Llewellyn &
- Kate Sheppard
Prehistoric Actual Size
- Steve Jenkins
The Fossil Girl
- Catherine Brighton
Stone Girl Bone Girl
- Laurence Anholt &
- Sheila Moxley
The Human Story
- Charles Lockwood
The 'life-as-grand-narrative' school of children's books, such as Spinar and Burian's spectacular Life Before Man, first published in 1972, tell the history of life as 'Manifest Destiny', in which isolated fossil remains are seen as parts of a preordained jigsaw.
Books like that have an undeniable appeal — I loved them as a child. The determinedly old-fashioned Life Story, published in the late 1980s, is very much part of that tradition. “This book is captivating,” says Phoebe, aged nine, “with its beautiful illustrations and words. I loved it!”
Phoebe is a chip off the old block, to whom the grand-narrative theme is an easy sell. The knack is to entice into the contemplation of life's splendid drama those children who might otherwise not have considered it — and, hopefully, to keep them there, enthralling them sufficiently that they spurn opportunities later on to become more interested in cell signalling or real estate.
How can this be done? Rachel is far less interested in the idea of dinosaurs as living animals than is her sister, but has a fine eye for a fossil in the field. For her, shapes and colours are as important as concept, and she enjoyed Neal Layton's calculatedly anarchic The Story of Everything, an elaborate pop-up book that looks like how Life Story would have turned out, had it been written by a mildly scatological graffiti artist.
In other words, what you need is a gimmick. The Pebble In My Pocket tries this through the valid, somewhat earnest mechanism of following the career of a pebble from its origins as volcanic lava until it ends up being picked up by a little girl 480 million years later: the history of life being told from the point of view of a pebble. The problem is that pebbles make unsympathetic narrators.
Ask Dr K Fisher About Dinosaurs is the other extreme — a scrapbook-like presentation of a collection of dinosaur problems solved by a prehistoric agony aunt. A juvenile T. rex, worried that his teeth are falling out, is consoled to learn that this is normal, and his teeth will be replaced. The children enjoyed the presentation, but it hardly lingered in the mind.
Fractionally more successful was Prehistoric Actual Size, in which parts of prehistoric animals — a tooth or a claw — are represented at their actual size. This is a clever idea, one of the thrills I get when seeing a museum specimen for the first time is realizing that the real thing is so much smaller (or larger) than I had imagined. But like many gimmicks, it's a one-trick pony.
The gimmick that works for everyone is to tell the history of life as a human story, in which real people are measured up against geological time, to give it scale. So the big hits chez Gee were The Fossil Girl and Stone Girl Bone Girl, two books about Mary Anning (1799–1847), the young woman who excavated many important specimens of early Jurassic marine life from the cliffs at Lyme Regis on the south coast of England. Both books are fictionalized and Mary Anning becomes every bit as mythical a character as Red Riding Hood. They found immediate acceptance with Rachel, who gravitates more to princesses than plesiosaurs. Stone Girl Bone Girl looks and feels indistinguishable from any bedtime story. This tried-and-tested formula still had enough facts about prehistoric life to satisfy Phoebe.
The Fossil Girl goes one better and does the childhood of Mary Anning as a really sharp graphic novel. This got full marks from Gees of all ages. Graphic novels could be the way to go: palaeoanthropology through the eyes of a six-packed Louis Leakey in the style of Judge Dredd? That has got to be better than The Human Story, the Natural History Museum's latest authoritative, uncool communiqué, brim-full of facts and threadbare on fun. Rachel says she might like such things, if they didn't have so many long words.
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Gee, H. Stones, bones and stories. Nature 450, 949–950 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/450949b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/450949b
