The Bone Museum, by Wayne Grady

The Bone Museum: Travels in the Lost World of Dinosaurs and Birds, by Wayne Grady
Four Walls Eight Windows/Penguin Group, 2000
284 pages plus index, no photos
Library: 569.9 GRA

Description
The theory that dinosaurs have evolved into birds has sent science writer Wayne Grady on a globe-trotting fossil hunt with brush and pick in hand. In The Bone Museum, Grady follows vertebrate paleontologist Phil Currie, one of the world's leading proponents of the bird-dinosaur connection, on a journey in search of answers to the question: is there life after extinction?

In 1996 a group farmers happened upon several unusual fossils in an ancient lake bed in northeastern China. The fossilsappeared to be those of dnosaurs, but bore an extraordinary feature: a thin aura of fibers, very much resembling feathers, outlining the skeleton. It is for this skeleton and in the name of what it suggests that Currie heads to China in hopes of tracing the evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs. Their trek takes GRady from China to Paragonia, and back to North America; exploring numerous sites on three continents, Grady and Currie dig and sift, literally piecing together clues that might answer the question: Did dinosaurs evolve into birds?

Paleontology provided strong evidence to support Darwin's theory that human beings are descended from apes-might it also support Currie's theory of transition and adaptation in a species thought to be long gone? Success in Currie's hunt would be to discover the most compelling evidence to suggest that there is life after extinction.

Living in tents and experiencing the drudgery of fieldwork as well as the thrill of doscovery, Grady recounts his journeys with great detail, clarity, and a storyteller's sense of narrative. Through frustrations, blisters, blinding wind storms, rain and mud, to the ultimate glimpse of bone, his tales offer a compelling blend of adventurous travel and intellectual quest.

[Darwin did not say man was descended from apes, surely, but rather than apes and man had descended from the same source.]

Table of contents
Part 1: Flight Paths
Phil Currie's Christmas Turkey
Lost Worlds

Part 2: Patagonia
To the Rio Negro
Theropod Heaven
Desert RainOverburden
Beyond the Dusty Universe
The Living Screen

Part 3: The Badlands
The Call of the WAkon Bird
A Day at the Bone Museum
Dry Island
The Fossil Song
Ghost Birds



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