Looking at the Accompanying Text on Dinosaur Themed Products

At Everything Dinosaur, our dedicated team members have been organising reviews and testing of various potential new products.  With the help of mums and dads we have been looking at all sorts of games, craft activities and jigsaws, just part of our continuing commitment to live up to our company name.  We come across all to frequently these days, misleading information about prehistoric animals included in many of the items we are testing.  We admit to being far from perfect ourselves, after all mistakes do get made, but every now and then we come across a gem that makes us smile.

Text About Dinosaurs

On the back of a dinosaur model making kit that was on test, we discovered some wonderful text attempting to provide the purchaser with a little more information on the evolution of the Dinosauria.  We admire such well-intentioned efforts from the manufacturer, but sometimes well intentioned efforts such as this can confuse more than they inform.

Well Intentioned Text That Misses the Mark

A well-intentioned effort highlights a more serious concern in schools.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

Under the heading “The Lost World” the text reads as follows:

“The dinosaur is large reptiles that lived in the earth for one hundred and sixty million years.  dinosaur lived in the Mesozoic and it divided into 3 geologic ages.  The first dinosaur showed up in the Triassic period, the 1st period of the Mesozoic, for the first time.  As all continents became tropical rain forests in the Jurassic period, The 2nd period of the Mesozoic, the dinosaur got bigger and had various looks.  The golden age of the dinosaur was the Cretaceous period, the 3rd of Mesozoic.” 

The text went on:

“As the earth was changed to similar with present various environments, the dinosaur evolved into many species.  The dinosaur, which lived on earth for a long time, died out suddenly at the end of the Cretaceous period.  It is constantly studied about interesting dinosaur’s world and extinction reason.”

Identifying Errors

It is certainly a good try and we suspect that if we were to attempt to translate English into Mandarin or some other such language we would fail miserably, but this text does raise an important issue.  We do find lots of errors on text both grammatical and factual errors.

Very often such well intentioned efforts can be forgiven , but we are finding a lot materials used in school which are also inaccurate.   Teachers and teaching assistants rely on suppliers and third parties to provide resources so that they can teach.  With our school visits, we have come across many instances and examples where resources contain a number of misleading items of information.  This is not the fault of the teaching profession, schools rely on these third parties to provide appropriate teaching materials, sadly, in many cases we see examples of glaring errors and mistakes.

Team Members Try to Help

Naturally, once spotted, our team members are happy to provide supporting materials to schools as free downloads to help address this situation.

We won’t name the manufacturer or indeed the product concerned, it did not make our approved list and therefore it will not be added to Everything Dinosaur’s product range.

To view the range of dinosaur and prehistoric animal themed toys and games in stock at Everything Dinosaur: Visit Everything Dinosaur.