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

by Sean Rubin, Sean Rubin (Illustrator)

Overview

Highlighting the role of artists in the scientific process, this crowd-pleasing look at dinosaurs explores how new discoveries deepen our understanding of the world.

Ever since mysterious bones were found in 1822, scientists and artists have tried to figure out what the creature they came from looked like. But it seems that every time they’ve made up their minds, someone makes a new discovery, and they have to start all over. That’s only fair, though—after all, it’s how knowledge advances!

With an inviting tone and detail-filled art, Sean Rubin traces the process of defining—and redefining—the dinosaur called Iguanodon. Entertaining, accessible, and beautiful, his tale will delight dinosaur fans, budding artists, and anyone curious about how science really works. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063239210
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Pages:	48
Sales rank:	368,489
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 11.70(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Award-winning author and artist Sean Rubin has contributed to the bestselling Redwall and Mouse Guard series and illustrated such picture books as the Sydney Taylor Book Award–winning The Passover Guest by Susan Kusel. His own books include the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Bolivar. He lives with his wife and two sons in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Award-winning author and artist Sean Rubin has contributed to the bestselling Redwall and Mouse Guard series and illustrated such picture books as the Sydney Taylor Book Award–winning The Passover Guest by Susan Kusel. His own books include the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Bolivar. He lives with his wife and two sons in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

12/18/2023

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.)

Publishers Weekly

Lively, funny, and mesmerizing.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The chipper text is entertaining and educational, packed with humorous asides and unexpected anecdotes without losing the overarching story. Younger readers will adore the arresting artwork, and older readers will appreciate the wealth of newfound knowledge. A terrific tribute to the adaptability of the scientific process and the wonders that it unearths.” — Booklist (starred review)

"Rubin’s pencil, watercolor, and digital collages portray the paleontologists and artists of each era alongside a rendition of the time period’s signature dinosaur, with humorous asides from both species." — Horn Book (starred review)

“Via carefully cross-hatched pencil and digital collage, sprightly prose, and comic asides, Rubin surveys changing depictions of dinosaur anatomy and presents those changes as examples of science as ‘a process that never ends.’” — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 2023-12-06
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)

Kirkus Reviews