Great Dinosaur Mistakes

The inspiration for Great Dinosaur Mistakes came when co-author Adam Smith and I were developing the concept for The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers, which shows how our understanding of T. rex’s appearance has been transformed since it was first discovered. As mentioned in the Author’s Note for that book, when I first suggested the idea to Adam, I thought there were not enough individual changes in T. rex’s appearance to fill an entire book, so we’d have to include some examples of changes in the appearance of other prehistoric animals as well. Two animals I suggested including were Iguanodon and Elasmosaurus. Adam got back to me with a list of a dozen more animals, but went on to say that he knew of enough changes to T. rex’s appearance to justify making it the sole focus of that book, which is what we decided to do. So, when we started to think about what we might do for our next book together, we went back to that list.

One factor that helped secure an offer for another book from publisher Fox and Ink Books was The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers winning Children’s Book of the Year: Animals and Nature in The Week Junior Book Awards. A critical part of that book’s appeal is the vibrant, characterful, but anatomically precise illustrations by paleoartist Stieven Van der Poorten. Both Adam and I knew that for Great Dinosaur Mistakes to work we would need Stieven to illustrate it, so we were relieved when he agreed to sign up for a second book with us.

While the The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers follows the gradual transformation of T. rex’s appearance in a series of steps, Great Dinosaur Mistakes brings modern depictions of prehistoric animals face to face with specific historical depictions that we now know to be mistaken.

The book required a lot more research than the books Adam and I had previously written together. While our previous books had focussed on a single prehistoric animal, this book gives equal prominence to eleven. And, in a book that points the finger at the mistakes made by other palaeontologists, Adam was particularly keen that we avoid making any mistakes of our own. Drawing eleven different prehistoric creatures accurately, as well as in a historically correct, but inaccurate way, presented Stieven with a far greater challenge as well.

While the books I write with Adam contain a lot of factual information, we like to present this information within an engaging and entertaining ‘framing device’. In our first book, The Plesiosaur’s Neck, the framing device is a playful rhyming text. In The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers it’s the comic dialogue between the two dinosaurs. The framing device we’ve used for this book is an encounter between a modern palaeontologist and the Ghost of Palaeontology Past*, inspired by Charles Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past from his novel A Christmas Carol. 

We asked Stieven to base the appearance of the Ghost of Palaeontology Past on Edward Cope, the American palaeontologist who was responsible for the most embarrassing mistake featured in the book, the Elasmosaurus with the head attached to the end of its tail. And Stieven used Susie Maidment, a British palaeontologist and a friend of Adam’s, as a starting point for the appearance of the modern palaeontologist.