How To Keep Dinosaurs is a book by Robert Mash, focusing on the subject of, well, how to keep dinosaurs. More specifically, it's a pet-owner's manual from a world where dinosaurs live alongside humans and are kept for a variety of purposes— as pets, as guard animals, for farming, and in zoos. The descriptions of the dinosaurs range from tongue-in-cheek to surprisingly well-informed, and the book is divided into several sections, starting with "Dinosaurs for beginners" and ending with "Dinosaurs for zoos and safari parks". Each species is given a detailed list of features, including "feeding", "housing", "breeding", and "availability".
Two editions of the book have been published, the first in 1984 and the second in 2004. The second edition featured a foreword by Richard Dawkins, and attempted to address some of the outdated facts of the first one, though many of them were left as-is. It also featured CGI illustrations, in place of the hand-drawn ones from the first edition.
Tropes:
- Adaptation Species Change: Some dinosaurs have their names changed between the first and second editions. For example, Microvenator (a small oviraptorid, believed at the time to have been a dromaeosaur) is changed to Microraptor.
- Adapted Out: Spinosaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus are absent from the second edition.
- All Animals Are Dogs: Many of the dinosaurs in the "Dinosaurs As House Pets" section are described in very dog-like terms, and the "Dinosaurs For Security Work" tend to skew towards Angry Guard Dog.
- The Artifact: Pictures of Pachyrhinosaurus and Spinosaurus can be seen in the introduction to the second edition, despite those dinosaurs being having been removed from it.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: The first edition had a lot of this. The second edition dialed it back some, but still had some noticeable mistakes.
- All large theropods are called carnosaurs, and all small ones are called coelurosaurs. This was the norm when the first edition was written, but it is still kept for the second edition.
- Feathered dinosaurs are, obviously, absent in the first edition, though the second edition adds feathers to some of them.
- Pterosaurs are shown perching like birds.
- Attack Animal: Most of the dinosaurs in the "Dinosaurs for Security Work" section are described this way, with special mention going to Deinonychus.
- Domesticated Dinosaurs: The entire point of the book.
- Double Entendre: The second edition contains a number of jokes like this regarding the Latin translations of the dinosaurs' names (e.g. Ceratosaurus translating to horny lizard).
- Eats Babies: There is an entire category for dinosaurs called "Likes children to eat". Enough said.
- Extreme Omnivore: Anything in the "unfussy eater" category, but Incisivosaurus (a dinosaur added in the second edition) really takes the cake for this.
- Gasshole: Many of the larger herbivores. There's even a category for them: "Worryingly flatulent".
- Gentle Giant Sauropod: Most of the sauropods, with the possible exception of Dicraeosaurus, which is small enough to see a human as a potential predator and therefore try to stomp them flat.
- Headbutting Pachy: Stegoceras is one of the dinosaurs in the "house pets" category, and potential owners are warned of its head-butting habit.
- Herbivores Are Friendly: Most of the herbivores qualify, with the exception of Ankylosaurus and Tarchia.
- Off with His Head!: This is what happens to farm workers who get too close to a Therizinosaurus harvesting crops.
- Raptor Attack: Raptors are present in both editions, and in the second edition Velociraptor is shown with feathers. Deinonychus, however, lacks feathers even in the second edition, and is essentially treated as a stereotypical pop-culture raptor.
- Retcon: Played for laughs. In the first edition it's stated that T. rex will only breed if it is kept in flocks. The second edition claims that the editors of the first edition left out the words "of sheep and herds of cattle" after "flocks", and apologizes to the numerous zoos whose exhibits died from the incorrect advice.
- Road Apples: In the second edition, there is an illustration of a man taking his Nodosaurus for a walk, with the caption saying that if you do so, you should "be prepared to clean up after your dinosaur". Sure enough, he's standing next to a massive piece of crap.
- Stock Animal Diet: Oviraptor is shown as an egg-eater, even in the second edition, which was written after the discovery that this wasn't the case.
