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THE IGUANODON'S HORN by Sean Rubin Kirkus Star

THE IGUANODON'S HORN

How Artists and Scientists Put a Dinosaur Back Together Again and Again and Again

by Sean Rubin ; illustrated by Sean Rubin

Pub Date: March 19th, 2024
ISBN: 9780063239210
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins

In lavish visual detail, Rubin chronicles our changing perceptions of what dinosaurs were like.

“Science is a process,” Rubin writes, and he picks a terrific case study to demonstrate the point. He specifically looks at fossil spikes that were thought by early discoverers to go on Iguanodon’s nose until later studies proved that they were parts of the dino’s front feet. The author more generally chronicles how dinosaurs have been transformed in our minds over the past century or so from drab, lumpish, lizardlike behemoths to today’s vivid visions of active, often riotously decorated creatures with “baggy bits and saggy bits.” In both the narrative and in exuberant whirls of historical reconstructions and fanciful prehistoric scenes rich with stylistic homages, often linked by sinuous ribbons of running dates and facts, he pays fulsome tribute to many of the amateur and professional paleontologists (and particularly paleoartists) who shaped these visions over the years. So it is that young dinophiles who linger over the art will meet a host of individualized human figures from solitary diggers and sketchers to racially diverse crews of museum workers painstakingly assembling, and reassembling, fossil bones. The dinosaurian cast includes Iguanodon, who appears repeatedly in evolving iterations making grumpy or punning comments (“I DO look pretty terrible here”) at its head. Readers will come away vastly more appreciative of, and knowledgeable about, the architects of the ongoing “Dinosaur Renaissance.”

Lively, funny, and mesmerizing.

(endnotes) (Informational picture book. 7-10)