Mistakes in books

We have  a whole lot of books, some are really old and we get a lot of very new ones to review. A few of the older books have mistakes, especially the dinosaur ones because sometimes scientists think one thing, and in the future they find out they were wrong, but the books have already been written. I know three mistakes with dinosaurs. My Mom's old dinosaur books from when she was little say Parasaurolphus used his crest to breath under water. They also though Brachiosaurus lived in the water and had his nostrils on top of his head so he could put just the top of head out to breath. They also have a dinosaur called a Brontosaurus, but there is really no such thing, it was a big mistake, made of an Apatosaurus body and a Camarasaurus head.

 

But a lot of my new books have other mistakes. I just finished a book called "Professor Astro Cat's Frontiers of Space". It says that astronauts had to wear heavy boots to keep from floating away in space. That is fake. The moon has less gravity than we have, but it still has gravity. Even a feather will fall to the moon, it just takes longer. We watched an astronaut drop a feather and a hammer on the moon on youtube today. If there was no gravity, making the boots heavier still wouldn't work. Without any gravity there is no weight. I really liked the rest of the book though.

 

Another book I read, "Horrid Henry's World Records" said the King Cobra is the most poisonous snake. Another fake. The sea snake is really the most poisonous snake of all, and the Taipan is the most poisonous land snake. Many other books have typos, or even whole sentences left out like

 

Horrible Histories Deadly Days was a really fun book, but it had a lot of mistakes. It said a massacre happened in 5,000 BC, and they said twice that that was 34,000 years ago. It is 2013.  If I add 5000 and 2013, I get 7,013. The book also says the youngest child sent to Australia as a prisoner was 9, but it also says a 6 year old was sent. A 6 year old is younger than a 9 year old. The book says Martin Luther's thesis "was mailed not nailed". My Mom looked that one up, and historians used to think that, but they changed their minds again. Finally it says that Nero's enemies claimed he played the fiddle while Rome burned. He couldn't have. There was no  such thing as violin then. They weren't invented yet - unless you watch Family Guy. Maybe he borrowed Stewie's time machine.

 

Horrible Histories Beastly Best Bits has a mistake too. I found two typos. Once the last word was cut off a sentence. The next time there was a sentence which said "When the police when to her house" .

 

I think more authors and editors are making mistakes because they haven't learned as much at school as the ones who wrote the older books did. I am just a kid and I can catch all these mistakes. Maybe more people should do home education. I think more people would notice the mistakes if they learned to really think about what they read instead of just believe everything a book says.