The Complete Book of Dinosaurs: A Fascinating Insight to 500 Species from the Prehistoric Age

Citation

Joint, N. (2005), "The Complete Book of Dinosaurs: A Fascinating Insight to 500 Species from the Prehistoric Age", Library Review, Vol. 54 No. 4, pp. 282-284. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530510593498

Here is a question: what is the point in spending £25.00 on a heavyweight book of nearly 500 pages about dinosaurs, when you can get pictures and information galore about these fascinating lizards on the 'net for free? Aren't big reference tomes as extinct as dinosaurs themselves?

Steve Parker's The Complete Book of Dinosaurs is a good test case. His work gives a chronological presentation of the main groups of dinosaurs, following the evolution of each group as they emerge, up to the mass extinction 65 million years ago. This account is briefly topped and tailed by the story of other life‐forms, just to complete the account of life on earth. The book works on a number of levels, as a readable narrative, a weighty reference work, and a serendipitous browse, ideal for kids doing school projects or serious amateurs needing a more in‐depth approach to the subject. The illustrations are superb, and the information about each dinosaur is presented in template form (maps of location, fact‐file, picture, text). This clear template makes each section easily digestible, but, in spite of the repetitive format, this book avoids a sense of monotony by means of high‐quality, well‐varied graphic design.

It's a good idea to turn first to the introduction of some twenty pages which, prior to the main narrative chapters, sets the scene nicely for the story to come, introducing basic ideas such as evolution, fossils (the finding, dating and recovering thereof), and the changing prehistoric geography of our planet. The author is a fellow of the Zoological Society in the UK, working out of the British Natural History Museum, and turns his expert knowledge to good effect in a brief section entitled “Myths and Legends”, where he explodes some commonly held false beliefs about these prehistoric animals. Interestingly, any one of these “vulgar errors” provides a good benchmark to test the relative merits of Parker's work against the freely available resources of the 'net.

For example, one common misconception is that Tyrannosaurus Rex was the biggest meat eater ever to walk this planet. This is now thought to be questionable. It's worth asking what a Google search tells us about the biggest meat eaters on earth. I did a Google search on some relevant keywords which generated the normal multitude of hits, but of the first 25 hits, four repeated this misconception about T. Rex. In fact one of the four came fourth in the ranking, which gave its misleading content high prominence.

Normally you would hope that a net‐savvy Googler would check the provenance of these web sites to see what background evidence supported the quality of the data they contained. The theory is that information‐literate filtering can protect the searcher in such cases. But, of the four less reliable sites retrieved, one was from the science education web pages of a respected English language national public service television broadcaster, one was in the homework section of a regional education authority of similar origin, another was from an e‐commerce site mainly designed to sell scientific equipment, and the last was from a public library site supporting children's use of library material. So, it is arguable that three of these sites had good enough credentials to lead the Google‐user (especially a younger school student) to place a high degree of trust in them. The up‐front commercial nature of just one site would have rung alarm bells. This shows that even apparently respectable web sites can be highly variable in quality, and present a challenge to the information literacy skills of children in particular. (In defence of the public library site, I should point out that the “unreliable” information came in a verbatim quotation from the plot description of a work of children's fiction being promoted by the library – it was obviously a dinosaur fantasy piece, which would have warned an adult, if not a child, not to trust the science of the text. This just shows the difficulty of using the web.)

It is clear then that even the most information‐literate web surfer can only deal with the content they find on the web – a high degree of information literacy in the searcher will not turn poor information into good, although it will help the searcher to make the distinction in quality. And there are without doubt some excellent web sites available on dinosaurs (which have been reviewed elsewhere – see O'Beirne, 2001; Natural History Museum, 2004). But Steve Parker's work wins hands down. Thus, if you think you should throw your new reference works in the bin, think again. No‐one would use a reference work that misdescribed four out of every 25 entries in its pages – but if you use the 'net instead of a reference work like The Complete Book of Dinosaurs, that is the risk you run. It is instructive to imagine a bibliographic description for the Google entries above, as if they were catalogued literally as a single, coherent reference work:

Title: Assorted web pages about dinosaurs: a fascinating insight into 500 species from the prehistoric age, of which some 80 species are misdescribed.Authors: … difficult to say.Place and year of publication: Everywhere, very recently.Pagination: several million.Price: free.

Why not spend the £25 on Steve Parker's book? You won't regret it.