A book by David K. Randall

I recently visited a Museum in Kansas that is known for housing a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex display in its lobby, and learned an interesting bit of information I was entirely unaware of regarding the discovery of the now iconic beast. Barnum Brown, a Kansas-born graduate student working for the American Museum of Natural History, was the first man to discover the skeleton that would set the scientific world on fire and make dinosaurs the enduring icon they are today. Not only did he almost single-handedly save American Museum of Natural History, but he nearly started a second “bone war” wherein all manner of wealthy museum owners flooded into the badlands of states like Montana or Wyoming looking to get their own piece of the dinosaur pie. The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World by David K. Randall is seemingly one of the more exhaustive books on Barnum Brown and the “museum industry” of the Gilded Age in America.

“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 unearths the first Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils in the Montana wilderness, forever changing the world of paleontology, Osborn sees a path to save his museum from irrelevancy. With four-foot-long jaws capable of crushing the bones of its prey and hips that powered the animal to run at speeds of 25 miles per hour, the T. Rex suggests a prehistoric ecosystem more complex than anyone imagined. As the public turns out in droves to cower before this bone-chilling giant of the past and wonder at the mysteries of its disappearance, Brown and Osborn together turn dinosaurs from a biological oddity into a beloved part of culture.”

This book goes from the antebellum years prior the The American Civil War (1850’s or so) all the way up to fairly recently as it talks about recent trends in the selling of dinosaur bones as a wealth statement for billionaires. With such a wide swath of time being looked at, I would have honestly preferred a more targeted look at just Brown and his quest for the elusive fossils that he needed to find to save his career as well as the museum funding him. That said, what we do have here is interesting and is a great way to dip your toes into everything from “Bleeding Kansas”, American Eugenics movements, the history of museums in America or even the pop culture history of dinosaurs. In all honestly, Barnum Brown is somewhat of background character in his own book at times, with the lion’s share of time being devoted to the war between two millionaires trying to outdo each other – Fairfield Osborn and Andrew Carnegie.

Overall, I liked this book, however it does meander a bit as stated above. It is written well and contains tons of information, so I can’t fault it for that. It especially provided me with other topics I might jump to later on in the realm of this early stage of dinosaur discovery – I especially need to learn more about the so-called “Bone Wars”. If you are like me and are looking for a book on a more obscure bit of US history, I’d definitely recommend checking this out.