![]() It was during an expedition to the Hell Creek Formation in eastern Montana in 1902 that Brown finally encountered the monster that gives the book its title. If a quarry had already been picked over by others, Brown was unfazed he would climb down “and come out with fossils everyone else had missed, a feat that happened with enough frequency that it seemed like he could see layers beneath the surface.” This, in Randall’s telling, is something Brown seems to have been born to do, having “a magical ability to unearth a specimen, like someone who can sit down and complete a jigsaw puzzle without first needing to find the edges.” With backing from the American Museum of Natural History, Brown scoured the cliffs and canyons of the American West in search of long-extinct creatures. Barnum - who grew up on a farm in Kansas, yearning to escape his humble origins. Norton 288 pages)Īt the heart of the story is man named Barnum Brown - his first name is an homage to circus showman P.T. Rex and How It Shook Our World” by David K. Rex and How It Shook Our World,” Randall, a senior reporter at Reuters and the author of a string of popular nonfiction books, takes us back to the turn of the previous century, when hunting dinosaurs - or at least their bones - was the stuff not of nightmares but of dreams: dreams of fame and recognition for those who unearthed them dreams of prestige for those who financed the expeditions dreams of bustling exhibition halls and enthralled visitors for those who ran the museums where the skeletons ended up.īOOK REVIEW - “The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. In “The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Randall colorfully puts it, the impression one gets of the beast, when gazing at its remains in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, is that it “would clearly like nothing more than to crush your bones with its serrated teeth and eat you up in a gulp or two, like the monster from a child’s nightmare made real.” ![]() rex (imagine 13 grand pianos falling on you all at once). Certainly we were fascinated by fierce creatures long before, from lions and tigers to crocodiles and sharks - but, vicious as they may have been, they couldn’t muster the bite force of almost 13,000 pounds attributed to T. ![]() T he funny thing about Tyrannosaurus rex is that it’s become so familiar - from Hollywood movies to comic books to children’s toys - that it’s easy to forget that we’ve only known of its existence for about 120 years. ![]()
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