Customer Reviews

Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs

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"Boy, Were We Wrong About the Dinosaurs!" is a wonderful picture book that teaches us about past perceptions about dinosaurs, and where the research is headed today. In this book, you'll that there have been a lot of thoughts about dinosaurs in the past that may not actually be true -- such as that dinosaurs were purely cold-blooded, or that dinosaurs were all really scaly. The book has wonderful illustrations to reinforce its points, and covers the basics with just enough detail to keep all audiences captivated.

Perhaps you remember that dinosaur report you had to give him when you were a student back in school. You told your classmates all those facts you read about the dinosaurs, only now to discover that many of them have turned out not to be true. Boy were your teachers wrong about the dinosaurs!

But what this book is telling us, and it's a great lesson to take away, is that we all do the best with what we can. Just keep an open mind, remember that science is ongoing proces, and don't be too certain of anything. Perhaps, if we keep these things in mind, we'll someday find out the real truth about the dinosaurs, or something very close to it.

A wonderful, thoughtful, and informative book. It's inpsired me to look into reading some of the author's other relases, such as "Boy, Were We Wrong About the Human Body!"

We just got this book from the library today and I came online to buy it because I just love it. It gives a little information about a lot of topics, without pushing anything too hard. Most importantly to my taste, it describes the constant progression of scientific understanding. But the book also touches gently on various cultural interpretations of fossils, the archaeology involved in finding the fossils, the continued development of technological tools for studying the same physical evidence, the hope of the next generation of minds, and the certainty that change will come. Very succint too. My dino-loving-three-year-old and my very-precocious-six-year-old both absolutely loved it.

A student of mine picked this up at a dinosaur museum and I have since bought it for several children as a gift. It is so informative and the illustrations are great! I also bought one for infant my son for when he's older!

A pretty great book, full of neat stories such as people mistaking Iguanodons' massive conical thumb bones for horns until they found a complete skeleton, or how some bone cross-sections look more like those of warm-blooded animals than of cold-blooded ones--which is part of what spurred the whole movement toward dinosaurs-as-bird-ancestors and away from dinosaurs-as-big-lizards.

But the book also is a better example of how science works than it really set out to be: It contains two glaring examples of how, for all the real power of the scientific method and (most) scientists' genuine commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, science is carried out (and interpreted and written about) by people who are subject, to a greater or lesser extent, to all the biases and assumptions of their day. Those blinders creep into their conclusions far more than they would like to admit.

For example, one of the points that the book makes is that we used to think of dinosaurs as having reptile-like parenting skills--i.e., none; they lay eggs and leave. But then paleontologists found evidence (such as nests with older hatchlings in them) that dinosaurs may have been more active parents.

Except the book doesn't say parents.

It says mothers. Over and over.

I have no need to project egalitarian parenting onto other species, where it often doesn't exist. But since it does exist among birds quite often, I would have been pretty slow to make such a massive assumption and present it as a "discovery."

And in fact, last December a flurry of articles about active dinosaur dads came out--some researchers think in some cases they were the primary parent.

Boy, was the book wrong--not in a scientific way though, in a lazy way.


The other bias in Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs strikes even closer to the heart of scientists and their self image. It starts off with a description of how the ancient Chinese found dinosaur bones and, in trying to figure out what they came from, came up with the creature we now know as the Chinese dragon. It shows a picture, says that they figured they must have been magic to have been so big, and thought they might be still around. "Boy, were they wrong!" Then it says, "Now we think many of our own past guesses about dinosaurs were just as wrong as those of ancient China."

Toward the end of the book we come back to this theme, but less diplomatically: "Perhaps today's ideas about dinosaurs will someday seem just as silly as the magic dragons of long-ago China."

Interestingly, instead of "Boy, were they wrong," everyone else, starting with European scientists from hundreds of years ago gets "Boy, were we wrong!" (emphasis mine). The message is clear: real scientific inquiry began after those initial discoveries, with the "we" of the rest of the book (all white by the illustrations).

Let's pause and consider for a second. What did the ancient Chinese think those bones belonged to? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. What did the first Europeans to try to make a theory about the same sorts of bones--a long time later and with far more technology--come up with? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. They gave it a different name. They came up with different wrong embellishments. They placed it into a different cosmology. But the ancient Chinese were basically doing the same thing, with fewer tools, and had remarkably similar results. They weren't right, but they were hardly silly.

I understand and support what the book's authors were trying to do: show how early scientific hypotheses can turn out to be as off-base as something that even a child can recognize as untrue. Only in the process of doing so, they revealed their own ethnocentric biases: They feel that dragons were an obviously silly, superstitious theory, while gray, reptilian brontosauruses dragging their tails through the mud were an educated hypothesis that happened to turn out to be inaccurate.

Boy, were they wrong.

I like this book because it shows how the theory of evolution applies to science itself. Strong hypotheses survive and multiply; weak ones die off. A scientist finds clues (in this case fossils), develops a hypothesis based on those clues, and as more information comes in scientists either confirm the earlier view or change it to account for the new information. Every generation of scientists tests the theories of the ones that came before as new information, new technology, and new methods for interpreting that information comes in. Nowhere is this more true than in paleontology, which -- as loyal readers will remember -- is my daughter's current favorite branch of the sciences.

That early theory that sauropods must have lived underwater because they were too large and clumsy to live on land? A better understanding of anatomy (and water pressure on oxygen-breathing creatures) moved those dinosaurs on land. And Iguanodon's nose spike? When a complete fossil of Iguanodon was found, scientists realized that what they had thought was a solitary nose spike was in fact a bone from the creature's hand.

This book does an excellent job of conveying to a young prospective scientist how exciting the scientific process can be, and the potential for her to take part in testing, adapting, and settling some of science's open questions. Were dinosaurs cold-blooded, warm-blooded, or something in between? Is the current asteroid extinction theory really the correct one? Which dinosaurs had bumps, which had scales, and which had feathers on their skin, and why? There are plenty of questions left to explore, which is a pretty exciting thought for both of us.

In spite of this insight into meta-inquiry, here's the bottom line: we first found this book a few months ago in our local library. We love it so much that we have checked it out several times since (in fact, it's sitting on our couch right now).

(Review originally published on my blog, Caterpickles - Scientific & Linguistic Engagement with a 4 Year Old Mind, caterpickles.com)