Traveling west with his family one day, Professor Potts discovered some interesting bones, and began to dig. Soon he had amassed an amazing collection of fossil bones never seen before and, transporting them back to his workshop in the east, he began to try to assemble them into a creature. His initial efforts were unsatisfactory to him, but eventually he thought he had it right...

Published in 1989, Big Old Bones: A Dinosaur Tale is an entertaining story that highlights how the field of paleontology moved ahead by trial and error. It put me strongly in mind of Barbara Kerley and Brian Selznick's Caldecott Honor-winning The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, which was published in 2001, and which also dealt with a 19th-century scientist who didn't quite get it right, when it came to the dinosaurs. Of course, the Kerley and Selznick book dealt with a real person, and the Carol and Donald's Carrick's story is entirely fictional, but they both highlight how knowledge advances with stops and starts, and sometimes takes the wrong path, before further investigation reveals the truth. I enjoyed both story and artwork here, and appreciated the afterword, which discusses some well-known errors made in the field of paleontology over the years. Recommended to young dinosaur lovers, and to fans of the Carricks. ( )

This is an exciting tale of how an old professor discovered some old bones an accidentally built an incorrect dinosaur.

This is a really good book, I believe to inform children on how discoveries are made through trial and error.

I would definetly include this book in any dinosaur story collection.