Having run into Dougal Dixon again at this year’s DinoCon, I thought I would review another one of his book’s for my latest post. Today’s review covers How Big? Dinosaurs: Amazing Life-Sized Dinosaurs and Other Creatures from Prehistory.
This book features illustrations of various creatures at 1:1 scale, much like Prehistoric Actual Size and Lifesize Dinosaurs. While those other two books were oversized to fit more into their pages, however, How Big? is a more standard sized book. This means How Big? often fits proportionally less of its subjects onto the page than the other two.
Despite the title How Big? Dinosaurs, the book includes more than just dinosaurs; many other prehistoric animals appear here as well. They are ALMOST grouped vaguely by time period; the Paleozoic animals appear near the front of the book, and the Cenozoic animals appear near the back, but within the eras, there is no particular rhyme or reason to how the animals are grouped (some Cretaceous animals appear before Jurassic ones, etc.).
This book includes a nice mix of familiar and obscure creatures. T. rex and Stegosaurus appear, as do creatures like Jakapil and Desmostylus. I like it when books mix things up like this, as the familiar serves to draw people in, while the obscure educates readers on topics they may not have encountered before. The information is generally accurate, though occasionally hypotheticals are stated a bit over-confidently, such as the assertion that the jawless fish Cephalaspis could generate an electrical field like some modern fish.
I generally like Patrick Corrigan’s illustrations; they are both acurate and artistically pleasing for the most part. However, I did catch a significant number of illustrations that seem to be copied from other sources. For example, the basking Atopodentatus are copied from Joschua Knüppe, the full-bodied Velociraptor illustration is based on one by Fred Wierum, the whale evolution chart is copied from Julio Lacerda, among others. If we’re going to get copied art, I think I would prefer to simply have the originals with accreditation.
All in all, I like How Big? Dinosaurs, but the large amount of copied art gives me pause in giving it my full “Stomp of Approval”. The fact that the art is generally accurate though does mean that readers will get a good sense of the animals featured at least, so if you’re looking for a good “lifesize” style book, I suppose you could do worse. With Dougal Dixon as the author, however, I would personally have hoped for better. For some better books by Dixon, check out When the Whales Walked and Tyrannosaurus rex: A Pop-Up Guide to Anatomy.
Dino Dad Reviews 
