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. 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 Manhattan. 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.
