This is not a coffee table book about dinosaurs, but it comes close. The Last Dinosaur Book is cleverly, colorfully, and lavishly illustrated. It is filled with movie stills, comic strips, cartoons, and, if that is not enough to hold your interest, you can flip pages 95 to 227 and watch an animated dinosaur come to life.

But before you think you have found the perfect present for that child who loves extinct behemoths, you should be cautioned: The Last Dinosaur Book is an exercise in iconology, not paleontology; it’s not about dinosaurs but about our cultural image of dinosaurs. Its author, W.J.T. Mitchell, is a professor of English at the University of Chicago, untrained in zoology and biology.