Given that this was done poorly by the standards of the day, can you point to a superior contemporaneous text on the same subject of superior quality?
Of course, Pliny referred to the first book and others in writing his Natural History, but it ended up as a sort of Dummy's Guide to Natural History, trying to compose a really wide subject matter into a few books over 2 years, and obviously getting a lot wrong in the process. It's fair to say nobody would have taken this seriously if not for his name.
This tangent's in response to all the downvotes for peterwwillis's opinion -- it seems reasonable to me, except maybe he should've said the standards of pre-Roman Greece.