Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury

Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science, by Deborah Cadbury
Henry Holt and Company, 2000 (first published in Great Britain as The Dinosaur Hunters)
326 pages plus a few b&w photos scattered throughout book, Notes and Sources, Select biblioraphy and index


Description
In 1812 a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Anning was collecting fossils for her father beneath the cliffs of Dorset when she discovered the outline of a lizardlike skeleton embedded in the limestone. Working with a small hammer, she unearthed a giant prehistoric animal seventeen feet in length.

News of her descovery baffled scholars and attracted the attention of the REverend William Buckland, an eccentric Oxford naturalist known for his interest in geology or "undergroundology" as he called it. Buckland eagerly used Mary's find and other remnant fossils to set in motion a quest to understand the world before Noah's flood, though his inquiry was in fact an attempt to prove the accuracy of the biblical record (the scriptures alone were the key to understanding history in his view, and fossils were interpreted in this context.)

Meanwhile, another naturalist, Gideon Mantell, a poor country doctor, uncovered giant petrified bones in a Sussex quarry and became obsessed with the ancient past that, he came to realize, must once have been teeming with creatures up to seventy feet long. Initially scorned by thes cientific establishment, Mantell risked his reputation and career to reveal his vision of the lost world of reptiles.

Despite their efforts, it was the eminent anatomist Richard Owen, patronized by royalty, the prime minister, and the aristocracy, who claimed the credit for the discovery of the dinosaurs. Through guile, political intrigue, and brilliant scientific insight, Owen rose from surgeon's apprentice in Lancaster to the highest echelons of society and was feted as the man who gave the extinct creatures their name, dinosaur or "terrible lizard."

Deborahh Cadbury's lively story re-creates the bitter food between Mantell and Owen, which drove one of them to despair and ruin and secured for the other unrivaled international acclaim. Their struggle brought to light the age of dinosaurs and created a new science that would forever change man's perception of his place in the universe.

Table of Contents
Picture Credits
Acknowledgments
Part 1
1. An ocean turned to stone
2. The World in a pebble
3. Toast of mice and crocodiles for tea
4. The Subterranean forest
5. The Giant Saurians
Part 2
6. The young contender
7. Satan's Creatures
8. The GEological Age of reptiles
9. Nature, red in tooth and claw
10. Nil Desperandum
Part 3
11. Dinosauria
12. The Arch-hater
13. Dinomania
14. Nature without God?
Epilogue
Notes and sources
Select bibliography
Index

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This blog is updated every Monday and Thursday with books, and at other times if news occurs

A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming, by Barnum Brown

A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming: The Journals of Barnum Brown and JP Sams. University of Kansas Expedition of 1895, by Barnum Brown andJ.P. Sams, edited by Michael F. Kohl, Larry D. Martin and Paul Brinkman
High Plains Press, 2004
128 pages, plus 1895 milestones, endnotes, bibliography and index



Description
Professor Samuel Williston led a group of rugged young dinosaur hunters from the University of Kansas to barely-settled Wyoming. They were searching for Triceratops, the three-horned dinosaur, still new to science.

Professor Williston, at the prime of an illustrious career in paleontology, had a nnew new museum at the university he wanted to fill with bones and fossils. A Triceratops would make a perfect addition.

This expedition was a turning point for two of the young students-Barnum Brown and Elmer Riggs-who would go on to eminent bone hunting careers of their own. As Riggs later wrote, they chose "to follow the lure of paleontology [while] lying awake...among the sagebrush of Wyoming...enjoying the coolness of a desert night, and looking up into the starry canopy above."

Wyoming, still "a tough cowboy place", only five yeares a state, was just beginning as well. The Kansas Expedition, accustomed to more civilized surroundings, marveled at Hartville, "composed of one shack, a combination of post office and whiskey saloon"; Wheatland, "a small osis in the desert...being boomed by eastern capitalists"; Badger where a home/store/post office was "about the size of a Kansas henhouse"; and Lusk, where the minister was a woman whose husband was serving time in the penitentiary.

Here young Barnum Brown and University Regent James P Sams record in two seperate journals the colorful details of the expedition. Editors Michael Kohl, Larry D Martin, and Paul Brinkman have put the diaries in context with expansive footnotes.

Table of Contents
Introduction by Paul Brinkman, Larry D. Martin and Michael F. Kohl

Barnum Brown Journal:
Kansas State Geological Expedition, 1895

J.P. SAm's Journal:
Fossil Huntin in Wyoming

Maps:
Routes of the 1895 Kansas Expedition
Southeast Wyoming, 1892
Wyoming Sites of the 1895 Kansas Expedition
Milestones, 1895
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
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This blog is updated every Monday and Thursday with books, and at other times if news occurs