I recently picked up a copy of Dinosaur Explorers from a local bookshop, and dug into it with moderately elevated expectations. It looked rather nice, and while there was some variation in the quality of the reconstructions, for the most part it looked fairly good at first glance.
Unfortunately, what could have been a quality dinosaur book is marred by frequent errors, many of them fairly basic ones at that. Frequent mislabelings jumped out at me the most, especially those that corresponded to other parts of the book that contained the correct information.
One of the first such errors is seen in the dinosaur family tree on pages 8-9. The group “Cerapoda” (the group that includes ornithopods and ceratopsians) is mislabeled at “Theropods”, despite the true theropod branch being correctly labeled right nearby. Plateosaurus and Parasaurolophus are both mislabled as “Hadrosaurus” at different points.
Several creatures are identified one way in the main body of the book, but then given a contradictory identification in the comparison chart in the back of the book. Monolophosaurus and Dilophosaurus are both correctly identified on page 48, but are conflated together in the chart, with an illustration of Dilophosaurus labeled as Monolophosaurus. A crested pterosaur that looks like Darwinopterus is labeled as both Rhamphorynchus in the main body of the book, and Dimorphodon in the end chart.
One such error that’s at least somewhat understandable concerns a plesiosaur that appears on page 62 and the end chart. Hydrorion brachypterygius is the full name of a plesiosaur, but somewhat confusingly, there’s also an ichthyosaur named Brachypterygius extremus. While I can understand how both these names got applied to the plesiosaur illustration, it’s still yet another failure of quality control for this book.
The text also seems to be under the apprehension that birds somehow evolved “out of” or “away from” being dinosaurs, when in fact they are still dinosaurs every bit as much as a T. rex. When defining dinosaurs as a group on page 6, the author states that “no dinosaurs flew”, and that nothing outside of the Mesozoic Era can be considered a dinosaur. This despite a fairly decent (if somewhat muddled) look at bird evolution and the development of flight later in the book.
I generally enjoyed the illustrations, and indeed, they were what initially set me up to expect this book to be better than it was, though there are still a few notable misses. The majority of maniraptoran dinosaurs are properly feathered, with the “birdiest” ones looking exceptionally good, though Archaeopteryx falls victim to the “wings with hands” design.
Sadly, the more famous “raptor” dinosaurs are depicted as mostly or entirely naked, such as Dromaeosaurus and Velociraptor. It’s disappointing to see this apparent bowing to pop culture designs when such better illustrations share the same book.
Numerous other little things here and there that would be too tedious to fully document also conspire to lower my opinion of Dinosaur Explorers. While I initially had high hopes for it, the frequency of basic errors leaves me no choice but to recommend against purchasing it. Just a little more proofreading would have caught the mislabelings I found, and a proper science advisor could have improved the other issues. For a better overview of dinosaurs, I recommend instead checking out Dinosaur Atlas, Dinopedia, Dinosaur Empire!, and When Dinosaurs Conquered the Skies.
Dino Dad Reviews 