An Illuminating History

of Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins,

Artist and Lecturer.

By Barbara Kerley.

Illustrated by Brian Selznick.

Unpaged. New York:

Scholastic Press. $16.95. (Ages 6 and up)

WATCH, now, as we employ the scientific method to determine what this book is about.

What does the cover show? A stubby old man in a handsome purple coat. His white hair sticks up like a troll doll's, and he holds a clay statuette of a four-legged creature. Behind him looms the enormous head of some lizardlike beast. The title, embossed in gold, reads: ''The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins.''

Two possibilities present themselves. Most likely this is an unflattering book about retirees at an accounting firm. But it may also be a toy catalog from a very exclusive department store.

Now, as we begin reading, we will see that our predictions were exactly. . . .

Oh. We are so embarrassed.

But it seems we are not the only ones to use scant evidence to reach plausible conclusions that turn out to be entirely wrong.

Take the subject of this book, for instance. He is Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a British artist of the late 19th century who was the first person to make life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs. Working with Sir Richard Owen, the famed scientist who coined the word dinosauria, Hawkins built fantastic monsters of brick, steel and concrete that were a sensation in Victorian England.

He wasn't very accurate. But he did his scientific best, basing his models on the few fossils available then, often little more than a tooth or talon. When he lacked bones he turned to living reptiles and amphibians for inspiration, and filled the gaps with his imagination. In other words, he used scant evidence to reach bold, fanciful conclusions that seemed reasonable but were later proved quite wrong.

Not that this makes the author, Barbara Kerley, or the illustrator, Brian Selznick, any less enthusiastic about their little-known subject. They seem driven to rescue Hawkins from obscurity, and they are right to try, for his story is compelling.

This account opens in London in 1853, with Hawkins in his workshop, awaiting important guests. Guided by Owen, he has been toiling over an array of huge dinosaur models, as well as those of other extinct reptiles and amphibians, which he has cast in concrete over frames of iron and brick. They will soon be unveiled at the Crystal Palace, the glorious new art and science museum at Sydenham Park.

His visitors -- Queen Victoria and Prince Albert -- are astonished. However did he do it?

''He was happy to explain: the iguanodon, for instance, had teeth that were quite similar to the teeth of an iguana. The iguanodon, then, must surely have looked like a giant iguana.''

Simple enough. And then: ''Just so for the megalosaurus. Start with its jawbone. Compare it to the anatomy of a lizard. Fill in the blanks. And voilà! A dinosaur more than 40 feet long.''

(And however did he get the idea, the money and a royal commission? Picky readers might wonder.)

The royals are amused, but Hawkins craves paleontological approval. In the book's oddest episode, he invites 21 of England's leading scientists and scientifically minded men to a dinner party on New Year's Eve 1853, at a table set up inside his unfinished iguanodon. The candlelit revelry lasts eight hours, with laughing, shouting and a song written just for the occasion: ''The jolly old beast is not deceased / There's life in him again!''

The story might have ended there, with Hawkins's dinosaurs drawing huge crowds, his reputation established, his life ahead a pleasant succession of teaching and speaking engagements.

But there is a dark second act, in New York City. In 1868, 14 years after Hawkins's triumph, the head of Central Park's board of commissioners decided to build a Paleozoic Museum on the park's west side. He invited Hawkins to stock it with models of extinct American animals, including dinosaurs.

Hawkins eagerly accepted, and spent months traveling the country, studying American fossils. He built the first model of a dinosaur skeleton, the newly discovered hadrosaurus, and then spent nearly two years building his sculptures in a workshop in the park.

Then Boss Tweed ruined everything. Angry that he could find no way to extract kickbacks from the Paleozoic Museum, he scuttled it. A despondent Hawkins went public with his dispute with Tammany Hall, and after an account of his speech appeared in The New York Times, Tammany Hall vandals smashed Hawkins's models to bits and buried the rubble in the park.

Because this is a true story, the narrative does not lend itself to the tidy, satisfactory resolution that picture books usually demand. In ''Dinosaurs in the Attic,'' a 1986 book about the American Museum of Natural History, Douglas J. Preston wrote: ''Hawkins, deeply shocked by the episode and disgusted with America, became an academic recluse at Princeton and later returned to England.''

Kerley sticks to these facts but softens their blow. She imagines him quietly retired to a villa near Sydenham Park, excited, not embarrassed, as a flurry of fossil discoveries point up the inaccuracies of his monumental creations.

This is an understandable ploy of someone writing for children. Less forgivable is her habit of trying to pump up the text with colons and exclamation points: Like this! After several paragraphs of this, the effect is predictable: It's irritating!

Kerley's sentences shout but never sing; a sharp editor might have made the prose less dinosaurian, and might also have pointed out little mistakes. (It is the Smithsonian Institution, not Institute, and pterodactyl needs an o.)

She atones for these minor lapses and her numbing perkiness with long endnotes that reveal her careful research and put satisfying meat on the story's bare bones.

The illustrations are more successful. There is a sly abundance of Victorian humbug in Selznick's pictures, especially when he allows Hawkins himself to introduce the story, lifting up a velvet curtain to invite the reader to the title page, which is executed with splashy lettering that evokes antique circus posters.

Kerley says people still go to the Crystal Palace Park to see the dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, although in a puzzling endnote Selznick discloses that the park's Dinosaur Island is ''generally closed to the public.''

If so, that is a shame. At least we are left this account of an exuberant early encounter between science and art. Although 3-year-olds today can learn more about correct dinosaur musculature from the ubiquitous images on bedsheets, T-shirts and sippy cups than from anything Waterhouse Hawkins ever made, he left behind a singular achievement.

He was the first to give people that stunned, delighted and scared-witless feeling that full-scale encounters with these terrible creatures, now reassuringly extinct, evoke. The gasps and shouts that filled the Crystal Palace in 1854 are repeated thousands of times a day in museums, multiplexes and cheesy amusement parks the world over.

Drawing: Illustration by Brian Selznick from ''The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins.''