The Monster's Bones by David K. Randall
Tyrannosaurus rex is probably the dinosaur first in mind for most of us. The erect, menacing figure is so familiar that it’s called by a casual, almost affectionate nickname, T. Rex. The millions of visitors who have gaped at the T. Rex skeleton, prominently displayed at Central Park’s American Museum of Natural History, have been responsible in large part for making T. Rex the star among the “terrible lizards” that roamed the Earth 60 million years ago until the crashlanding of an asteroid wiped away most life on this world.
In The Monster’s Bones, David K. Randall argues that the discovery and display of T. Rex, specifically the big beast housed in New York’s American Museum, “changed the course of modern life.” It’s the sort of immodest claim that publisher’s embrace—a hook of distinction, a “new” idea to catch attention. As Randall’s text shows, modern life was already undergoing rapid change when the full skeleton of a magnificent T. Rex was first assembled at the American Museum in 1908. In the age of Edison—of such new inventions as electric lights, sound recordings and motion pictures—make way for T. Rex?
The Monster’s Bones offers a good summary of the how dinosaurs were identified as a distinct species, a project that began in the 19th century with the reading of the fossil record in Great Britain and spread quickly to the U.S. Fossil discoveries coincided with the geological reckoning of an ancient Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Dinosaurs exemplified the rise and fall of species over unfathomable lengths of time. Unlike other vanished forms of life, the scale and monstrousness of the dinosaur bones captured the public imagination. They stirred archetypal memories of dragons and other monsters and, according to Randall, mirrored the oversized ambitions of the era’s predatory capitalists.
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Randall puts a human face on the story by focusing on two pairs of American fossil hunters, Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope on one hand, and Barnum Brown and Henry Fairfield Osborn on the other. Marsh and Cope were literally at war. Their competition for fossils was as brutal as prospectors fighting over gold as they slandered and misdirected each other’s expeditions. When they met, their camp followers came to blows.
Perhaps with their bad example in mind, Brown and Osborn got along. Randall paints an almost hagiographic portrait of Brown as a young man formed from the Kansas soil, paying “no attention to hierarchy or rank, looking past the trappings of social status without ever feeling the need to question whether he belonged.” Osborn by contrast was an East Coast insider, an ambitious ne’er do well who ventured onto many branches of science (with his father’s wealth as a safety net) before settling into his role at the American Museum of Natural History, then a fledgling institution. Osborn was canny enough to sense the public interest in dinosaurs and Brown was eager to lead the expeditions to find them.
In his epilogue, Randall illustrates the enduring fascination with T. Rex with a sales figure. In 2020, Christie’s auctioned a T. Rex skeleton (discovered in 1987 in the Black Hills) for $7.6 million. “Tyrannosaurus rex was now worth as much as works by European masters, spurring rural landowners to try to strike it rich with bone hunters,” he writes. The anonymous auction winner appears to be an oil-rich Middle Eastern prince, meaning that the bones of that particular monster may will be housed in the foyer of a palace and never seen in public again.
