Reading Is Believing

Extinct animals are found alive. A Doctor is suddenly endowed with X-ray vision. A metal bar passes through the skull of a construction worker—and he somehow survives. These are not fictitious headlines ripped from a newspaper tabloid, but true stories that will thrill and amaze kids in grades four through seven.

You might begin with Phineas Gage (Houghton, 2002), a hair-raising account by John Fleischman. In 1848, Gage was working as a construction foreman in a small Vermont town. While laying railroad track one day, he had a gruesome accident. In a horrifying instant, an iron bar shot straight through Gage's head, entering his cheek and emerging out of the top of his skull. Incredibly, he was still able to walk and talk.

Gage survived this ordeal, but was never the same person. The foreman had suffered massive brain damage resulting in an altered personality. Six years after his death in San Francisco, in 1860, Gage's corpse was exhumed, and his skull removed for study. Today's scientists deduce that, along with pieces of his brain, Gage lost the ability to socialize. Watch your booktalk listeners go goggle-eyed when they catch a glimpse of Gage's skull on the cover of Fleischman's fascinating book.

If Gage's doctors had possessed an X-ray machine, they may have been able to examine the effects of this incredible accident more closely. It wasn't until 47 years later, in 1895, that Dr. Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen began experimenting with cathode rays. During one experimental session, the stunned doctor realized he could discern the individual bones in his own fingers. Ask your listeners to imagine what it must have been like to be able to see inside the living body for the very first time.

Roentgen's amazing new "X rays"—named for the mathematical symbol representing the unknown—enabled people to see past the boundaries of the visible world. Physicians and scientists gleefully experimented with the strange new rays on themselves and others, unaware of the accompanying health hazards: overexposure caused radiation sickness, forcing many victims to have their hands amputated—the same hands they had used to convince others that X rays were safe. Scores of other experimenters died horrible, painful deaths. Carla McClafferty's The Head Bone's Connected to the Neck Bone: The Weird, Wacky and Wonderful X-Ray (Farrar, 2001) will leave your audience spellbound.

Other amazing stories don't involve such horrific consequences, but are no less bizarre. One summer day in 1938, a South African museum worker received an improbable gift from a local fisherman: a coelacanth, a sea creature that scientists believed had been extinct for 70 million years. The museum worker wanted to preserve the creature by freezing it, but couldn't find ample storage space. So instead, she had it stuffed. In 1997, a scientist discovered another coelacanth, this time in an Indonesian fish market. Fortunately, the scientist took photos to validate his far-fetched find. Such records turned out to be important, as living coelacanthes have proved difficult to find and study. Fossil Fish Found Alive: Discovering the Coelacanth by Sally M. Walker (Carolrhoda, 2002) tells this highly entertaining and entirely true fish story.

Mammoths, of course, are truly extinct. But in 1997, two young Siberian brothers, the Jarkovs, happened upon an extraordinary find. They spied two huge curved tusks sticking out of the snow, each weighing more than 100 pounds! Knowing their enormous value, the brothers broke off the tusks to sell in the market.

The brothers eventually led scientists to the site, where buried beneath the snow they discovered a completely preserved woolly mammoth. But hauling a gigantic specimen out of the ice is no easy task. How scientists accomplished that and what they are still learning from the find makes for another amazing story, engagingly told in Woolly Mammoth: Life, Death and Rediscovery (Scholastic, 2001) by Windsor Chorlton.