I started reading about these ancient marine reptiles. Everyone knows about dinosaurs, but very few people realize that in the oceans at the same time were these incredible reptiles — many of them just as large as the dinosaurs and every bit as ferocious if not much more ferocious — because they were all predators unlike the dinosaurs, some of which were grazers or whatever.
I started thinking, “Why aren’t these animals on the radar? So many kids like dinosaurs. You would think they would really love these things, too.” I wrote up a proposal, sent it to one publisher, got rejected. I had an editor at Houghton Mifflin, who was really interested in it; but then she left and went to Charlesbridge Publishing.
She called me up when she got there and she said, “Sneed, I still want to do this book.” I started researching about these ancient marine reptiles which included things like ichthyosaurs, which looked like dolphins, but they were reptiles. A great example of convergent evolution, they were built for speed because they had to pursue squid and other high speed prey.
A beautiful example of evolution where it can take two totally different groups of animals — mammals and reptiles. I looked into those and these animals with kind of squat little bodies and really long necks called the elasmasaur, which are kind of a plesiosaur. What else happened was — researching the book — is I started getting into the stories of their discoveries.
It turns out, these ancient marine reptiles, or sea dragons, were much more popular and had been discovered before dinosaurs. Back in the early 1800s, every one was crazy about these ancient marine reptiles. When dinosaurs came along, they just fell off the map, basically. You learn a lot of these interesting stories about the early scientists who were studying these things. One woman was named Mary Anning and she was just an amazing fossil hunter. She discovered the first plesiosaur in England. She discovered the first terradactyl fossil and just really advanced science very far.
In America, there were two scientists who were constantly competing, who could make the best find of these giant marine reptiles? There’s a funny story there. One of them discovered this giant plesiosaur and a elasmasaur with the long necks. He was so anxious to get it on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Natural History.
They assembled it all and he put the head on the tip of the tail by mistake. Well, who do you think discovered this? Well, his archrival who walked into the door one day and he’s looking at this thing. He said, “Beautiful find, but why did you put the head at the tail?” Once word got out, his credibility was just shot forever after that. It was fun to write about this natural history of these animals, but also about the process of discovery in many interesting little stories that you find out about them.