How to Use Digging Up Dinosaurs By Aliki as a Learning Tool
Adeki's Digging Up Dinosaurs is one of those older picture books that actually holds up. The art is straightforward, the information is solid, and it covers paleontology without talking down to kids. Most people who find it are parents or teachers looking for something that doesn't suck. It works. The book walks through the whole process: how fossils form, how paleontologists find them, what they do with them once they're out of the ground. It includes information about different dinosaur species, excavation methods, and even touches on museum preparation. The illustrations show fossil digs in progress, which is useful because a lot of books skip that part entirely.
Digging Up Dinosaurs By Aliki
Available in paperback and hardcover. You can find it on Amazon, Book Depository, through your local library, or at most large bookstores. The ISBN is 0060220564 for the HarperCollins edition. Older printings sometimes have slightly different art, but the text is essentially the same across all editions. I ran into a problem last year when a student was using a library copy that was missing pages 28 through 31. The book is printed in signatures, and someone had cut out those pages somewhere in the distribution chain. The missing section covers bone preparation techniques, which is actually one of the more important parts. I figured it out because the numbering jumped from page 27 to page 32 and there was no transition in the captions between the fossil extraction and the museum display sections. The workaround was simple — I printed the missing pages from a PDF I found online and taped them back in. For anyone building a collection, I'd recommend buying your own copy instead of relying on libraries for this one. The book's real strength is that it doesn't pretend paleontology is just about digging stuff up. It shows the slow, careful work of brush and dental tools, the plaster jackets used to protect fossils during transport, and the lab work that follows excavation. That's the part most pop-science books for kids gloss over. They show a scientist holding a T-Rex skull and call it a day.
There are gaps you should know about. The book was published in 1982, so it reflects the science of that era. Some dinosaur classifications have changed significantly since then. The book treats birds as a separate group rather than avian dinosaurs, which modern cladistics has revised. Also, the section on feathered dinosaurs is basically nonexistent because that understanding hadn't developed yet. If you're using this with a child who will cross-reference with newer sources, that's fine. If you're using it as the sole reference, you're going to have some corrections to make along the way. One thing beginners miss when working with this material: the book explains fossil formation well, but it doesn't cover taphonomy in any depth. That's the study of what happens to an organism between death and discovery. Knowing the difference between a bone bed formed by a flood event versus a site where animals died over centuries changes how you read the illustrations. The book shows clean, single-species fossil sites because that's what looks good in a picture. Real digs are almost never that tidy. I also noticed that the scale diagrams throughout the book are inconsistent. Some dinosaurs are shown to relative scale and some aren't. This isn't a flaw in the writing, it's just a design choice that makes it harder to use the book for comparative anatomy. If you want accurate size comparisons, you'll need to supplement with something like the SUES skeleton data or a recent field guide.
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For educators, the book works best as an introduction. It's not going to replace a unit on Earth science or life science, but it gives students a concrete entry point. The glossary at the back is useful, though dated in places. Words like "stratigraphy" and "sediment" are defined clearly. Words like "archosaur" aren't included because the book predates the current surge in theropod interest. If you're looking for something more current, Nick Crundell's illustrated guides or the newer Smarter Classics editions from various publishers fill the gaps. But for a first exposure to the field, Digging Up Dinosaurs remains one of the better options available. It doesn't oversimplify, and it doesn't pretend the work is easy. That's worth something.
