Alpheus Hyatt Verrill

Theodore Roosevelt stated: "It was my friend Verrill here, who really put the West Indies on the map.”[citation needed] During 1896, he served as natural history editor of Webster's International Dictionary, and he illustrated many of his own writings as well.

Upon his death, P. Schuyler Miller noted that Verrill "was one of the most prolific and successful writers of our time," with 115 books to his credit as well as "articles in innumerable newspapers.

Verill's books were praised for their entertaining writing style but were criticized by biologist Joel Hedgpeth for containing "outrageous fabrications" to appeal to younger readers.

[3] Geneticist H. Bentley Glass wrote that Verill had written a number of entertaining works but his Strange Prehistoric Animals and Their Stories was riddled with errors and what passed as fact in the book was "hardly distinguishable" from fiction.

[4] Lionel Walford, a marine biologist, wrote in a review for Verrill's Wonder Creatures of the Sea that the literary quality is "nullified by its lack of scientific dependability".