The Iguanodon’s Horn: How Artists and Scientists Put a Dinosaur Back Together Again and Again and Again

How do people conjure what extinct dinosaurs looked like? Via carefully cross-hatched pencil and digital collage, sprightly prose, and comic asides—and using informative sidebars to catalog changes in iterative iguanodon portrayals—Rubin (This Very Tree) surveys changing depictions of dinosaur anatomy. First, the work straightforwardly presents Mary Ann Mantell and husband Gideon’s 1822 discovery of parts of an unknown creature. The couple attributes their findings to an extinct animal, which Gideon names “iguanodon”; he believes a bony spike they find sat on its nose. Early attempts to sculpt dinosaurs capture public attention, but “unfortunately, they were totally inaccurate,” reads tongue-in-cheek text (“Seriously. This is embarrassing,” an early iguanodon sculpture complains). When a complete skeleton is unearthed in 1878, paleontologist Louis Dollo suggests that the iguanodon walked upright, a theory that subsequent discoveries, showing no tailmarks, debunk. But Dollo does identify the bone spikes as part of the creature’s hands. More recently, in the late 20th century, John Ostrom’s theories led paleontologists to see dinosaurs as birds’ colorful forebears. Images of dinosaurs tend to be accepted as fixed; this volume shows them as continually changing, and presents those changes as examples of science as “a process that never ends.” An author’s note concludes. Ages 4–8. Agent: Marietta B. Zacker, Gallt & Zacker Literary. (Mar.)