The Wild Life of Dinosaurs by Mike Barfield
Mike Barfield has been wild about science and animals from an early age. He is the winner of the Blue Peter Children’s Book Award 2021 in the ‘Best Book with Facts’ category, and has also been shortlisted for the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize, the Association for Science Education Children’s Book Prize (twice) and the De Bary Award for Outstanding Children’s Science Books (twice). His new book, a companion to the hugely popular The Wild Life of Animals, is The Wild Life of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. Here Mike tells us how he came to combine his loves of science, the natural world and comedy into his writing for children.
I’m a very lucky person – I get asked to write funny non-fiction books for children. This means I am paid to blend together two of my favourite passions: making jokes and researching fantastic facts. It’s a dream job, really, but not one that I ever actually thought about doing. The younger me had two other careers in mind instead.
Astronaut. Sports star. Social media influencer. If you ask young people today what dream job they would like to have when they grow up, those tend to be amongst the top answers. Not me. As a child, the one job I aspired to was to be a newsagent as I reckoned it would allow me to read the weekly comics before anyone else.
When I got a little older, my ambition changed to becoming the next David Attenborough. Alongside my love of comics and jokes, I had an equally huge passion for nature and wildlife. I kept tadpoles and newts, built a pond in the garden, went bird-watching, even had an owl and a grass snake, and roamed the Leicestershire countryside, just as Sir David had as a lad.
I went off to university to study biology, just like Sir David did, and got a good degree, but then I felt a terrible tug from my first love – comedy and jokes. So, with the encouragement of friends, I became a freelance comedy writer. First in radio, then eventually in television. I also wrote jokes for newspapers and magazines, and then progressed to drawing my own cartoons, which have now been featuring in Private Eye for 28 years and counting.
My debut funny non-fiction book for children was published back in 2013. It was called SWAT! A Fly’s Guide to Staying Alive and, though I didn’t know it then, set the pattern for pretty much all the books I have written since: facts and fun in a comic book style setting. I drew that first book myself, but since then I have been so fortunate to work with many brilliant illustrators from all across the world, including Paula Bossio, whose beautiful and hilarious art graces The Wild Life of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals.
We’ve never met, as she was born in Colombia, and now lives in Australia, which is about as far away from me as she could possibly get! Paula had her own challenges to meet with our dinosaur book. Palaeontology is a very fast moving science, with new discoveries continually being made, and modern ideas about how animals of the past looked and moved are constantly, ahem, evolving.
One good example of this is when the pages of the book were receiving their final pass from myself and the editorial team at Buster to look for any errors. A note came through from the on-board dino expert to announce that the latest study of the anatomy of the fossilised throat bones of Tyrannosaurus rex made it very unlikely that it was capable of roaring. It probably just hissed aggressively instead. Remember that next time you’re watching Jurassic Park!
I’m very proud of the book we have all made together. I read the most up-to-date scientific papers I could find in researching it, and learned so much I never knew – including the mind-boggling fact that dinosaurs had fleas! I also got to make a lot of jokes! However, I do have one regret, which I allude to in the dedication at the front of the book.
Our son Jake was dino-mad as a five year old. He is now a grown man. I just wish I could have written this for him twenty years earlier!
Oh well. Though I had no inkling of it growing up, I think what I do now would be many people’s idea of a dream job. I mean, getting to write a funny, fact-filled book about dinosaurs – how cool is that? And there’s another thing too. Yes, I did once have an ambition to be the next David Attenborough but – thankfully for all of us – he’s still in post, and a vacancy has not arisen. Long may that continue!
The Wild Life of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals by Mike Barfield, illustrated by Paula Bossio, is published by Buster Books. Out now. https://www.mombooks.com/contributor/mike-barfield/
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.
