MEET AUGGIE, CALIFORNIA'S STATE DINOSAUR

Did you know that California had a state dinosaur? Meet Auggie. In September 2017, Augustynolophus morrisi (Auggie's scientific name), was declared the official state dinosaur of California, the only place its fossil bones have been found. It was a large hadrosaur, reaching 26 feet in length and weighed a hefty 3.3 tons. Like all species of hadrosaur, Auggie was a plant eater. Hadrosaurs were one of the few known species of dinosaur that chewed their food.

I first learned about Auggie on a recent visit to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where numerous Auggie souvenirs are featured in the gift shop. The museum also has an impressive display of dinosaur fossils.

I have always been fascinated with dinosaurs and prehistoric animals and written a number of books about them. Here are a few. You can find these books in your library or as ebooks on Amazon.

REMEMBERING MY EDITOR, VIRGINIA BUCKLEY (1929-2020)

Virginia Buckley, 2005

Amid all the momentous events of the past days, I learned that Virginia Buckley, my editor for more than ten years at Clarion Books, passed away on October 21, 2020, at the age of 91. Virginia had a distinguished career as a children’s book editor and I was proud to work with her. As one of Virginia's colleagues described her, she was “an old school editor.” She took a deep personal involvement in all the books she edited–from working with the author on revisions, to final editing and the production of the finished book. My years with Virginia were before the current age of online editing programs. My manuscripts were submitted on paper and came back peppered with corrections marked in red pencil. Comments were attached on yellow post-it notes to the side of the page. If a question arose, sometimes it was easier to discuss it over the phone. Together we made changes to make sure that the final product was the best that it could be.
Virginia’s  career in publishing began at Thomas Y. Crowell in 1971 and in 1980 she moved to Dutton to be editorial director of Lodestar Books. In 1997 she went to Clarion Books where she became my editor after Dorothy Briley, the editor I had worked with previously, died suddenly. Over the next thirteen years Virginia and I worked together on eight books.
Because Virginia lived on the East Coast and I in California, we did not meet in person very often. Occasionally I made a trip to New York, or I saw her at a national conference. The last time I saw Virginia was in 2005, when I received the Washington Post/Children’s Book Guild Award for Nonfiction for my body of work and she was invited to give my introduction at the award luncheon. (Unfortunately, my only photo of her is from that event and the picture is fuzzy because my camera did not work well in low light.)

Award from the Washington Post/Children's Book Guild

Many of the books Virginia and I worked on were illustrated with beautiful watercolor illustrations by Laurie Caple. Laurie put as much effort into researching her artwork as I did in researching my text. Virginia told a story about how Laurie had purchased a giant fossil tooth as a model for her illustrations for my book Giant Shark: Megalodon, Prehistoric Super Predator.

The last book I worked on with Virginia was Global Warming and the Dinosaurs, published in 2009, about dinosaurs that had lived in Earth’s polar regions. Virginia retired from Clarion in 2010 and I lost contact with her. I often think of her when I share my dinosaur and fossil books with children at my school visits. I was sad to hear of her passing. Her work will live on in the many books she edited, both mine and those of many other authors.

For more about Virginia Buckley and her work with other authors and editors, see her Obituary in Publishers Weekly.

 
My Clarion Books (Houghton Mifflin) edited by Virginia Buckley:
Giant Shark: Megalodon, Prehistoric Super Predator (2000)
Easter Island: giant Stone Statues Tell of a Rich and Tragic Past (2000)
Dinosaurs With Feathers: The Ancestors of Modern Birds (2001)
When Mammoths Walked the Earth (2002)
Uluru, Australia’s Aboriginal Heart (2003)
Pterosaurs, Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age (2007)
Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age (2004)
Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age (2007)
Global Warming and the Dinosaurs (2009)

NGSS Standards and GLOBAL WARMING AND THE DINOSAURS

The Next Generation Science Standards provide guidelines for science education from K-12. Based on a report produced by the National Research Council they call for a new approach to teaching science.
Books like mine can be used in support of achieving these standards, especially in Life Science (LS) and Earth and Space Science (ESS).

Global Warming and the Dinosaurs by Caroline Arnold (Clarion, 2009)
NGSS Standards for grades 3, 4 and 5:
3-LS4-2. Use evidence to construct an explanation for how the variations in characteristics among individuals of the same species may provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.
4-LS1-1. Construct an argument that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.
4-LS1-2. Use a model to describe that animals receive different types of information through their senses, process the information in their brain, and respond to the information in different ways.
4-ESS1-1. Identify evidence from patterns in rock formations and fossils in rock layers to support an explanation for changes in a landscape over time.
4-ESS2-2. Analyze and interpret data from maps to describe patterns of Earth’s features.
5-ESS2-1. Develop a model using an example to describe ways the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and/or atmosphere interact.

Global Warming and the Dinosaurs: New Fossil Discoveries

My newest book, A Warmer World, details how climate change, or global warming, is affecting wildlife today. Our planet has gone through many periods of warming and cooling.  In the Dinosaur Age, the Earth was MUCH warmer than it is today--so warm that there was no permanent ice at the poles.  It was global warming big time!
     In my book Global Warming and the Dinosaurs you will learn about dinosaurs that thrived in Earth's polar regions. New discoveries in Alaska, Antarctica, Australia, and elsewhere are revealing how these ancient reptiles not only survived at Earth's extremes but were well adapted to live there. Evidence from bones and teeth to trackways and skin impressions raise important questions. How did polar dinosaurs cope with three months of total darkness in winter? What did they eat? How cold was it? Today, as we face the consequences of global warming, dinosaur fossils are helping us to understand what a warmer Earth was like long ago.
You can see a preview of Global Warming and the Dinosaurs in this book trailer on YouTube.

Project: Peanut Butter and Jelly Geology

I love learning about fossils, and they are often the topics of my books.  When I was a child in Minneapolis, Minnesota, my family used to go on rock and fossil collecting expeditions. I still remember climbing cliffs along the Mississippi river to collect chunks of limestone and the thrill of cracking them open.  If we were lucky, we would find inside the perfectly preserved skeleton of a creature that had lived millions of years earlier. Later, on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon, I remember looking at the layered rock of the canyon walls and learning how each one represented a period of geologic time.

"Earth Sandwich" an edible demonstration of various layers of the Earth's crust

One of my all time favorite classroom projects is making  an “Earth Sandwich” as a model of the layers of the earth.  Each part of the sandwich represents a part of Earth’s crust.  When you cut the sandwich in half, it is a little like looking at the walls of the Grand Canyon.  As you enjoy your Earth Sandwich, you are eating your way through time!
To make your sandwich, you will need:
    pumpernickel bread for coal
    rye bread for sandstone
    white bread for limestone
    peanut butter for dirt
    jelly for oil or tar
    raisins for boulders
    pretzel sticks for fossil bones
My recent books about fossils include Global Warming and the Dinosaurs and Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age.

Writers and Dinosaurs

Caroline with Skeleton of a Giant Sea Reptile (Los Angeles County Natural History Museum)

Fellow blogger and children’s book writer Greg Leitich Smith has launched a feature on his blog showing photographs of  children’s book authors with dinosaurs.  Well, obviously not with REAL dinosaurs, but with skeletons or other representations of the giant, extinct reptiles.  Last week he put up a post of me with skeletons of two of my favorite extinct reptiles, a mosasaur, a type of  giant sea reptile, and a pteranodon, a giant flying reptile. I am comparing my wingspan with that of the pteranodon, whose wings stretched nearly 20 feet from tip to tip!  While these creatures are not dinosaurs, they are both giant reptiles that lived in the Dinosaur Age.  You can read about them in my books Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age and Pterosaurs, Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age.  (And, just in case you are having trouble pronouncing the word “pterosaurs”,  remember that the “p” is silent so the word is pronounced as if it begins with “t”.  Pterosaurs were not birds and did not have feathers.  Their wings were made of thin skin.)

How Do We Get Ideas?

How do we get ideas? On occasion, they come full blown in a sudden flash of insight. More often, though, they evolve a little bit at a time. My recent book, Global Warming and the Dinosaurs: Fossil Discoveries at the Poles, was a project that developed slowly. At first, all I had were random bits of information. These facts, fascinating though they were, did not make a book. I did not have enough and I still needed an organizing principle. But by keeping all those interesting bits floating around in my mind, over time, an idea for a book on polar dinosaurs began to gel.

This is the opening paragraph of my article Evolution of a Book Idea: From Percolation to Publication published in the Spring 2011 issue of Kite Tales, the newsletter of SCBWI-Los Angeles. In the article I discuss how the book grew out of my natural interests in fossils and dinosaurs, how conversations with librarians gave me valuable new material, how other book research added to what I already knew, how experts in the field helped answer questions, and finally, how a chance encounter propelled me to start writing and finishing the book. Click here to read the full article on page 31.

Global Warming and the Dinosaurs is illustrated with beautiful watercolor paintings by Laurie Caple. Laurie has illustrated five other books of mine about prehistoric animals and has done a fantastic job on all of them. Her naturalistic style is perfect for these books. She does as much research as I do to make sure that everything she draws is as scientifically accurate as possible. This is a challenge when most of what she draws has been extinct for millions of years. By creating whole environments for the animals, she truly brings them to life.

I am often asked, why don’t I illustrate all my own books? After all, I’m trained as an artist. The truth is that I don’t want to illustrate all my books. My style does not necessarily always suit the subject matter I write about. I am delighted that artists like Laurie Caple can illustrate my books. It takes just as much time to illustrate a book as it does to write it. If I did all my own illustrations, I wouldn’t have as much time to write. I enjoy illustrating my own books, but only when the concept of the writing and the art work together for me.