So many kids love dinosaurs that it’s difficult to remember that there weren’t always dinosaurs for them to love.

“‘A Former State of This Earth’: Fossils in Early American Works for Children” is a brief introduction to works on fossils published for American children in books and magazines from 1802 to 1853. Some are illustrated; many aren’t. Many of the illustrations, as with much of the text, are redrawn from earlier works.

Ezra Sampson mingles fact with folklore in Youth’s Companion; or An Historical Dictionary, a collection of paragraphs on everything from William Herschell to cannabis; his tangle of information on the mammoth includes speculation that its bones were scattered from Siberia to North America by the Deluge.

Taking the bible as a source of historical information, the author of Blair’s Outlines of Chronology presents the then-standard explanation that the earth was created in 6 literal days about 6000 literal years ago and that the Deluge was an historical event, since “the earth bears visible marks of having experienced some great convulsion.”

In “Petrified Forests,” the Juvenile Rambler describes transformed forests near Rome and near Yellowstone, though the author doesn’t attempt to place them in the geological chronology.

Evidently reprinted from a British work, “The Fireside” describes coal and the history of its use. In a kind of tag-team lecture style common in early works for children—including other pieces in Parley’s Magazine—a father and mother explain to their fascinated children that coal is made up of the remains of forests uprooted by the Deluge.

Though mastodons had been discovered well before 1839, “The Mastodon” is an early attempt to describe its bones to American children—though “describe” doesn’t mean that readers of the Youth’s Cabinet would understand what the animal looked like.

Robert Merry’s Museum offers young readers an articulated mastodon skeleton and a detailed description, in “The Mammoth.” The piece served to introduce a fuller discussion of fossils to appear later.

Josiah Holbrook gives geology its due in “Organic Remains,” which includes illustrations of a megatherium skeleton and explains that animals become extinct, “to give place to other and different races, each succeeding race being fitted to the state of the earth at the time they inhabited it.”

The Deluge is no longer mentioned as the source of coal when Parley’s Magazine prints “Who Filled the Coal Hole?,” which stretches the age of the Earth from 6000 to more than 60,000 years.

“Petrified Forest on the Nile” describes a fallen stone forest apparently on the shore of a vanished sea, in one of the few pieces on geology to appear in Young People’s Magazine.

The editor of The Young People’s Mirror presents readers with a long list of the types of creatures found in fossil form, in “Geology;” implied is that the creatures were exactly the same as modern versions.

The Young People’s Mirror mixes humans into the paleozoic stew in “Fossil Foot-Prints,” illustrating a piece on fossil footprints with an engraving of two “human” footprints found near St. Louis, Missouri.

“Professor Pickaxe” explores the history of the Earth and the variety of prehistoric life in the seven-part “Letters About Geology.” Geology proves that the earth was created in 6 of “God’s days” untold ages ago. The Deluge isn’t mentioned.

“Uncle Jacob” discusses the investigation of creatures who lived “many ages, perhaps, before the creation of man” in “The Ancient World (1872), accompanying an illustration based on Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s sculptures of labyrinthodons, pterosaurs, iguanodons, and other dinosaurs in London’s Crystal Park.