Irregular Books

On the terms of some children, If The Dinosaurs Came Back, by Bernard Most, is a fine book with some interesting visualizations imagining what would happen if the Earth of tens of millions of years ago was combined with the Earth today. For my son, however, the book doesn’t quite ring true.

Bernard Most seems to imagine dinosaurs mostly as really big tools just waiting for people to come along and use them. Most visualizes dinosaurs serving as bridges for people to drive over, ladders for painting houses, cranes for building skyscrapers, and plows for turning the earth over for giant farms.

The dinosaurs in this children’s book are docile implements for human domination of the Earth. What would they be fed in order to fuel their gigantic appetites? Where would all the vegetable matter for the sauropods come from, what with all the dinosaur-powered construction covering nature up with asphalt? Who would provide the flesh for tyrannosaurus work horses to feast upon?

These questions weren’t dealt with. The dinosaurs in this book are rather uninteresting anti-godzillas, confirming our Earth-wrecking habits rather than confronting them.

One might say these issues don’t matter, because it’s just a children’s book, or that we can’t expect the book to represent the responsible relationship between people and their environment, because the book was written way back in 1978.

However, my seven year-old son spotted the gap between the natural character of dinosaurs and the contrived behavior of the resurrected beasts in this book. After I got done reading it to him, he commented, “Dad, if dinosaurs came back, they would be wild animals and ferocious.” It’s a truth obvious enough even for elementary school.

If you want comforting stories about animals rather than ferocious tales of nature, then stick with Mrs. Tiggywinkle the hedgehog. Don’t mess with the character of dinosaurs.