Science is a method of studying concerning the world. However simply as essential, it’s a human exercise. It’s people who do science, and people are riddled with biases and preconceptions; hopes and fears; anxieties and quirks. All these elements form the science that folks do specifically instances and locations with out rigidly figuring out it. Rubin understands this, and it’s the one largest cause why The Iguanodon’s Horn kicks a lot ass.
Rubin additionally understands that science progresses as a lot by failure as by success. Actually that is true of dinosuar paleontology. So his story, when it will get going, is basically a narrative of (triumphant) failure. Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell reconstruct Iguanodon as 100 foot-long iguana. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins reconstructs it as a beefy reptile with a mammalian carriage. Louis Dollo reconstructs it as an enormous reptilian wallaby. Later unnamed paleontologists reconstruct it as an animal that most well-liked a horizontal posture and held its tail aloft. Most of those views are fallacious, and a few are— with the advantage of hindsight— egregiously fallacious. But The Iguanodon’s Horn avoids treating failures as objects of ridicule, and even as mere slips. As an alternative, Rubin presents them as daring and inventive imaginative achievements, completely explicable by way of the assets accessible to their authors, and— implicitly however crucially— as ladders that later scientists mount to assemble extra sufficient fashions. True, Rubin places some expressions of incredulity within the mouths of his iguanodons. (I by no means learn the speech bubbles, however that’s simply because it disrupts the in any other case admirable stream of the e book.) However the principle textual content is all the time sympathetic to its historic actors. Even the Mantells— most egregiously fallacious by current requirements— are praised for getting sure issues proper, and for usually erring in affordable methods.*
[* As a sidebar, the first thing I wrote for this site, called “Comparisons with Teeth,” used the story of Iguanodon to illustrate a point about the nature of comparative reasoning in paleontology. Here I relate how Gideon Mantell first estimated the length of Iguanodon to be 60 feet, later 100 feet! (It’s now thought to have grown to about 35 feet.)]