Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong!
- Nick Crumpton (author) &
- Gavin Scott (illustrator)
NOSY CROW: 2021. 64 PP. £12.99.
One page in, Nick Crumpton confronts head on the question that I and indeed many other grown-ups may be asking themselves on picking up this new children’s book: “Now why on earth are you holding ANOTHER book about dinosaurs?” In spite of a lingering concern that my own personal journey here has something to do with being a ‘dinosaur editor’ at Nature Ecology & Evolution who is still regularly shamed by her nephews who know more dinosaur taxa than she does, I gamely wait to be told the real reason I need to read this book. The premise is that most of the facts that we non-specialists think we know about dinosaurs are old, and old research has often been superseded by new findings. So here in 64 gorgeously illustrated pages is an attempt to present the cutting edge in dinosaur research to an audience of 7–9-year-olds and their lucky parents (and aunts). In tackling the things we thought we knew about dinosaurs, Crumpton cannily avoids (and even upends, occasionally) the low-hanging old chestnuts of misdiagnosing pterosaurs and plesiosaurs as dinosaurs, or whether Brontosaurus was real, and goes straight for the big questions that palaeontologists are grappling with even as we speak, in a punchy format of “wrong” facts followed by discussion that Nature Ecology & Evolution’s youngest editor (age 5) loved. Crumpton’s zoology expertise is strongly evidenced on every page, but always lightly and entertainingly deployed, as he tackles such topics as convergent evolution, the patchiness of the fossil record, diverse dinosaur habits, phylogenetic placement and de-extinction. He’s not shy of stating when there’s disagreement, either, letting younger readers know that not all palaeontologists agree, for example with the contentious 2017 proposal to group theropods and ornithischians together (Baron, M. G. et al. Nature 543, 501–506; 2017). The full range of dinosaur ecology and evolution research today is exposed — he covers energetics, mechanics and feeding ecology, as well as the diversity of palaeontologists who research these topics. This is apparent both in the generic illustrations of different palaeontological specialisms (where we see wheelchair-using scientists and researchers of different ethnicities and genders at work side-by-side) and the fabulous two-page spread of women palaeontologists round the world, many of whom have either reviewed or published research in Nature Ecology & Evolution: it was particularly nice to see Sanaa El-Sayed El-Bassiouni featured, who as the text notes was part of the first Egyptian team to unearth and publish an Egyptian dinosaur, Mansourasaurus shahinae (Sallam, H. M. et al. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 2, 445–451; 2018).
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