A gripping narrative of a fearless paleontologist, the founding of America’s most-loved museums, and the race to find the largest dinosaurs on record.
In the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars, two vastly different men emerge with a mission to fill the empty halls of New York’s struggling American Museum of Natural History: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a privileged socialite whose reputation rests on the museum’s success, and intrepid Kansas-born fossil hunter Barnum Brown. When Brown discovers Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Montana wilderness, he single-handedly saves the museum from irrelevancy and helps turn dinosaurs from a biological oddity into a beloved part of culture.
Vivid and engaging, The Monster’s Bones journeys from prehistory to present day, from remote Patagonia to the unforgiving badlands of the American West to the penthouses of New York City. With a wide-ranging cast of robber barons, eugenicists, and opportunistic cowboys, New York Times best-selling author David K. Randall reveals how a monster of a bygone era ignited a new understanding of our planet and our place within it.
““The Monster’s Bones is such an irresistibly good read and such a compellingly smart book. David Randall takes his tale of fossil-hunting and museum building and deepens it into something more―a story in which both the long-vanished dinosaurs and the humans who discover them are equally dangerous in their own unique ways.”
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“A spectacular yarn of science and adventure, The Monster’s Bones takes us back to the birth of paleontology, when a Kansas farm boy made the find of a century―and a wealthy racist in New York tried to exploit it. Randall has excavated a classic, a story every bit as big and head-spinning as the T. Rex at its center.””
“Astute and entertaining ... an absorbing account of early dinosaur discoveries and their cultural legacies.”