Dictionary of Dinosaurs

I’ve reviewed a few “encyclopedia” and “dictionary” type books on this blog before, but none of them have been comprehensive, instead presenting a curated list of famous and/or interesting dinosaurs. Dictionary of Dinosaurs purports to set itself apart from these others by striving to be “an illustrated A to Z of every dinosaur discovered”, at least at time of writing in 2018.

The species depicted are organized strictly aphabetically, without regard to family group or time period. This could be fine on its own, though organizing by family group may have been helpful for this particular book, since not every dinosaur actually gets its own illustration.

Furthermore, only the illustrated dinosaurs get any kind of description. The un-illustrated ones merely get their name, length, diet, time period, and country of origin, with no indication of what they looked like or were related to. This means more of the species in the book are just names with practically no information for the reader to absorb about them.

I’m frequently left scratching my head over some of the decisions made in terms of what to illustrate. Several famous dinosaurs like Apatosaurus and Deinonychus are glossed over without proper description, while several fragmentary, dubious, or even synonymized dinosaurs get detailed entires, such as Anatotitan and Dravidosaurus. There also seem to be some that are outright missing, such as Anchiornis and Stenonychosaurus, to name a few.

If we ignore the descriptions of dubious genera, then most of the information presented is decent, though a few errors slipped through the cracks. For example, Leptoceratops is stated to be ancestral to other ceratopsians, despite living at the End Cretaceous right alongside Triceratops. Now, Leptoceratops does happen to be a more “primitive” looking ceratopsian, so I guess I see where the mistake came from, but it is no less misleading. Another particularly egregious mistake comes when the therizinosaur Erlikosaurus is said to have looked similar to dromaeosaur Deinonychus, when in reality they looked about as different as two theropods possibly could from each other. Perhaps if Deinonychus had gotten a proper illustration and description, this mistake would not have been made.

I want to like Braun’s artwork, and indeed I do enjoy the vector art style in general. Unfortunately, the accuracy of the illustrations is hit or miss. The feathered dinosaurs in particular are rarely depicted properly. In fact, Velociraptor, Troodon, and most of the ornithomimids are depicted as completely featherless.

Dictionary of Dinosaurs seemed like it had some promise at first glance, and I do like the general idea of it. Unfortunately, I have too many criticisms with it to recommend it to anyone. I would instead recommend Dinosaur World by Julius Csotonyi, which has the same concept, but is far more comprehensive and accurate.