Tamsin Mather's Reading List

"There are a lot of dinosaur books out there for kids, for good reasons. They’re very inspiring and fascinating for young readers. But what we really liked with this book is that it sets the dinosaurs in a much broader context. There are plenty of dinosaurs in here, but the book covers all of prehistoric life. You can dip in and find the bits on dinosaurs you want, but it also gives an appreciation that ancient life is much more than that. I really enjoyed that there were some quite wacky things in here. “What has five eyes, no legs and a trunk?” You sort of think of a very unusual elephant, but it’s an opabinia, a really weird creature that we’ve got fossil records for from the Cambrian period and we get to marvel at several other of the wacky body plans that life tried out during the Cambrian explosion, too, which is something I only learned about as a graduate student. The cartoon style works really well. It makes it fun, makes it approachable, and has a sense of time in it as well. I was a bit nervous that Steve, who is a dinosaur expert, would find stuff wrong in this book, being such an expert, but he loved this book as well — he was really enthusiastic about it. Yes, I think maybe that’s coming across a bit."

"The veterinary knowledge really came through. There are lots of books about animals in children’s literature, because children love animals. What we really liked about this book is that it’s a proper book on anatomy, and not just human anatomy, it’s much broader. We felt this is a really a great book for pulling kids in, because they want to learn about animals, but actually it lays out a whole system explaining lots about the different ways that we study anatomy. It’s a really rich book, and I learnt a lot by looking at it. It has great visuals, with wonderful double pages that make you want to read more. We thought the combination of drawings and photos works really well. In terms of its organisation, it’s about different body shapes and how we characterise them, different organ systems, and how they fit together. There’s a section on skeletons, and then information about all the different sorts of skeleton types with examples. One of the pages I really love is on hands. It starts with thinking about our human hand, the best on the planet at grasping and using tools. But across the animal kingdom, there are many different appendages that have evolved, from paws to flippers, and each is perfectly suited for a specific lifestyle. I liked the way that this led me to look at something as familiar as my own hands more like a scientist and think about what they’re good at, and what the other types are good at. It’s a really nice way of systematising thinking about the variety that we see in the animal kingdom, looking at your own body, but also bodies much more broadly — both on the outside and the inside."

"This is the sort of book I would have loved as a child. It’s massively visual, and packed with things you can flick through and read more about. The other thing I would have loved is looking at the maps and the amazing photos of landscapes. Yes, exactly. You have all these different, amazing places, which will awaken children’s sense of exploration of the world around them. But there is also plenty of background stuff about how we study rocks, the systems we use, and planetary-scale theories like plate tectonics. Yes, and the different layers of the Earth. Any book that has Inge Lehmann mentioned in it is onto a winner with me, she was such a pioneer and did such an interesting piece of work about the inner core and the outer core but often gets overlooked. Another thing that the panel found really positive is that it has a section on how children can study rocks themselves. It’s not just about the world as big and wide and amazing; it’s also about going to your local park or to your back garden if you have one, and thinking about the things to look for, the places you might go. And it tells them about how to do this safely as well, which is really important. There’s a whole page on where to look for rocks, but also a reminder to ask whether it’s safe and legal. This book has an immensely wide scope, but it also brings you back to the local, opening young readers up to seeing new things in the landscape around them, and giving them a good excuse to get out and about. Again, I can see some great teaching activities around this one."

"This is the most grown up of the books. I think it’s something that adults will get a lot out of, as well young people. The premise of the book is that what sets humankind apart is not that we’re more intelligent than the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s our ability to accumulate and share information , including in an intergenerational sense. We don’t have to relearn everything from one generation to the next and we have repositories of knowledge where learning comes together. We’re in the age of information, information is at the heart of everything that we do these days, we’re bombarded with it. The book is organised under different themes: language, drawing, writing, printing, science, news, networks, broadcast, computers, and it even has a section on the history of disinformation, which is such a current topic and such an important topic for young people in particular. The coverage is very big — we’ve got computer science, communication science, cosmology , military science, music — and that’s very interesting because it shows the underpinning nature of technology . It’s a very different book to the others on the shortlist, and it’s fascinating. It’s a novel way of approaching thinking and what has made us who we are today. Yes, we had a very rich longlist, 42 books down from over 90 that were submitted. There are definitely areas that are more represented than others. There’s an element of market economics in that certain things sell better, and publishers need to go with that. When we did the shortlist, we tried to find books that either did things a bit differently — like The History of Information — or that took something more familiar, like dinosaurs and animals, but took a different viewpoint on them. Not every area of science is getting equal playtime in terms of children’s books, but I was really inspired by the submissions that we had. I learnt loads from the other judges, and I think I’ll learn even more when we get the verdict back from our young readers. I’ve actually been writing a children’s book about volcanoes with Daniel Long as the illustrator. I’ve written for adults before, but it’s so different when you bring the combination of illustrations and text together. It’s really powerful when these threads come together, and that’s very different to adult science writing where you may have some illustrations, but they generally sit apart from the text itself, rather than being woven together with equal importance. It has fascinated me to think about how those two elements of scientific storytelling work together to best effect, and I think that when this synergy makes the science leap out of the page, it is part of what the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize is all about."