Just Like Us! Crocs. By Bridget Heos.
Illustrated by David Clark. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $14.99.
Earth by the Numbers: A Book of Infographics. By Steve Jenkins. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. $14.99.
Dinosaurs by the Numbers: A Book of Infographics. By Steve Jenkins. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. $14.99.
No one is ever likely to accuse the
long-running Just Like Us! series by
Bridget Heos and David Clark of profundity. These short factual books, by
combining photography with Clark’s art work, are designed to engage children in
nature by pointing out ways in which various animals – and even plants – are a
lot like humans, despite the many other ways in which they are quite different.
The “a lot like us” concept is, of course, just a hook to get kids interested:
those things can’t possibly be much like us, can they? The books’ appeal lies
in a response of “you’d be surprised!” And so it is in the latest series entry,
which is about crocodilians – not only crocodiles but also alligators, caimans,
gharials and muggers, those last being a particular type of crocodile. With
their elongated heads, big teeth, and long tails, crocodilians are excellent
subjects for caricature, and Clark takes advantage of all their characteristics
in his drawings, while the photos throughout the book show how these powerful
reptilian water predators really look (for one thing, they are not nearly as
big-eyed and bug-eyed as Clark makes them!). Heos does her usual fine job of
finding things that these critters have more-or-less in common with humans:
they have multiple ways to communicate with each other, from bellowing to
making a slapping noise by clamping their mouths shut on the water’s surface;
they protect their young, with both mothers and (sometimes) fathers taking care
of the little ones; and they love spending time in the sun. The specifics of
the comparisons, of course, show how different crocodilians are from humans
rather than how similar they are: that sun-basking, for instance, is used by
crocodilians to adjust their body heat, since these animals are “ectothermic, or cold-blooded” – kudos to
Heos for using both the correct scientific term and the more-common but
less-accurate popular one. Heos does her usual good job of mixing interesting
facts with the compared-to-us information: again using sun-basking as an
example, she points out that because crocodilians do not sweat, they keep their
mouths open while sunning so the air can cool them enough to stabilize their
body temperature. This neatly explains the very commonly seen pictures in which
on-shore crocodilians have their mouths wide open. The lineage of crocodilians
is a long one, far longer than the measly one of human beings: Heos points out
that modern crocodilians are directly descended from ones that survived the
worldwide catastrophe that nearly wiped out the dinosaurs. By the end of Crocs, young readers will likely
conclude that crocodilians are not really very much like us after all – but the
real point here is not to emphasize similarities that, to the extent that they
exist, are very much surface-level. The point is to get kids interested in
delving more deeply into the topic – and the fine bibliography at the back of
the book provides a number of good places to start doing just that.
Steve Jenkins’ books of infographics –
diagrams, charts and graphs – are no more in-depth than the Heos/Clark series,
but they too communicate a good deal of interesting factual information in an
appealing, easy-to-grasp form. Books such as Earth by the Numbers and Dinosaurs
by the Numbers fit well into our video-focused age by being visually
striking, very easy to look at (all the illustrations “pop” against plain white
backgrounds), and just informative enough to provide the basics on various
subjects and point children toward sources with more-in-depth material (the
bibliographies of Jenkins’ books are short, but the sources are well-chosen). Earth by the Numbers contains some
material that will likely be genuinely surprising both to young readers and to
parents. For instance, it is well-known that most of Earth’s surface is covered
by water, and Jenkins shows that visually, but his next visual shows that fresh (drinkable) water represents only
a tiny, tiny portion of all the water on Earth, and the visual after that shows
that of the very small amount of potable water worldwide, the vast, vast
majority is either underground or frozen. Parents and children alike may pause
to consider the implication of this – one of many times in Earth by the Numbers that Jenkins visually displays evidence of the
fragility of our world and our place in it, without ever saying directly just
how delicate our existence is. Earth by the
Numbers also includes an explanation of the reason that Mount Everest is
Earth’s highest mountain but not its tallest: that distinction goes to Mauna
Kea in Hawaii, which is more than 4,000 feet larger in vertical measurement but
which has its base deep under the ocean and is therefore highest but not tallest. There
are some excellent explanations of natural processes here: “A speedy glacier
moves about as fast as a snail crawls.” And there are some genuinely surprising
facts: the driest place on Earth is the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, where no
rain has fallen for thousands of years. (Chile’s Atacama Desert, which gets
about one-twelfth of an inch annually, earns an honorable mention.) And just
like Heos and Clark, Jenkins includes a timeline in Earth by the Numbers – starting with our planet’s formation in the
unimaginably distant past of 4.5 billion years ago and proceeding to the
comparatively recent first appearance of dinosaurs (235 million years ago) and
to and beyond the time 66 million years ago when “an asteroid hits the earth
and wipes out the dinosaurs.”
Jenkins’ statement on dinosaurs in Earth by the Numbers is not quite
correct, though, and he is well aware of that, as shown in Dinosaurs by the Numbers, which says at the very start that “about
66 million years ago, almost all of them vanished.” That “almost” is important,
not so much because crocodilians are still around – they did survive the end of
the dinosaur age, but they are not dinosaurs – but because birds are everywhere today. “Birds are living dinosaurs!” exclaims
Jenkins, and this is just one of the intriguing pieces of information in Dinosaurs by the Numbers – although it
is one that parents and even some children may have heard already. Still, the
infographics format of Jenkins’ book makes the facts visually interesting:
Jenkins shows a dinosaur skeleton that looks much like the skeleton of a modern
bird, and he gives a size comparison among that feathered dinosaur, a modern
pigeon, and a human hand. The ability to put things in perspective – whether
through timelines or illustrations – is a strength of Jenkins’ books. His
creative timeline for “when did the dinosaurs live?” is made up of circles,
each representing a million years, and therefore shows in a very striking way
just how long the age of dinosaurs lasted and just how short the age of humans
has been (humans get just two circles, and that includes going back to the very
earliest forms identifiable as human, not the much-more-recent start of Homo sapiens). The scale drawings
comparing dinosaurs with modern-day animals also show size in a visually
compelling way, including one illustration indicating that the largest dinosaur
discovered to date, Patagotitan, was
a bit longer than a modern blue whale but definitely less hefty: the blue whale
remains the largest animal Earth has ever seen. Dinosaurs by the Numbers includes intriguing comparisons, examples
being one of the skulls of extinct and modern creatures, and one of the speed
of dinosaurs and that of modern animals – with an explanation of how scientists
figure such things out. A two-page “dinosaur facts” presentation after the
infographics is a useful feature of Dinosaurs
by the Numbers, giving more details on specific dinosaurs and showing how
to pronounce the animals’ scientific names. Jenkins’ presentations in his
infographics books are not always 100% accurate: the “wipes out the dinosaurs”
remark in Earth by the Numbers is one
example of this, and another, in Dinosaurs
by the Numbers, is his definition of reptiles as “a group of egg-laying
animals with scaly skin” – many reptiles give birth to live young (and some
dinosaurs may have, too). Nevertheless, Jenkins’ attractively designed,
easy-to-look-through books can be a fine foundation for families that want an
introduction to some difficult and complex topics – and these books, like those
of Heos and Clark, may well inspire parents and children alike to move on to the
many more-thorough studies that can be found elsewhere.
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