Booklist: Reading Between The Bones

Reading Between the Bones: The Pioneers of Dinosaur Paleontology, by Susan Clinton. Franklin Watts. 1997.

A book written for teens, but suitable for adults as an introduction to the subject.

Description
You are given a fossil bone belonging to an animal many millions of years old. Now describe what this creature looked like, how it lived, and how it died.

Sound impossible? Not to a paleontologist. The scientists profiled in this book rely on bones to reveal clues about the giant animals that roamed the earth millions of years ago. They respect fossils as the foundation of paleontology.

Nevertheless, the bones do not guarantee understanding. Though the bones literally make up the skeleton of our knowledge of dinosaurs, just looking at the bones isn't enough. The scientists in this book have read between and around the bones to understand better how long-extinct creatures walked, ate, raised young, and eventually died.

The story begins with Georges Cuvier, who prided himself on being able to describe an entire animal from a single bone. When someone presented him with an especially unusual bone in 1824, he announced that it belonged to a lizard the size of a whale. He had described - for the first time ever - a dinosaur.

Many others followed Cuvier's lead, including Gideon Mantell, who coined the phrase "the Age of Reptiles" and O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, who raced each other to find the remains of bigger and bigger dinosaurs in the American West.

In a lively style, author Susan Clinton introduces us to other major players in this fascinating field, bringing us all the way to the present. Inn highlighting the lives of the pioneers of dinosaur paleontology, she not only explains the lives the scientists, but also the life of the science.

Table of Contents
1. "A Lizard the Size of a Whale": Georges Cuvier and the Discovery of Extinction
2. "In the Midst of Wondeers": Gideon Mantell and the Age of Reptiles
3. "Bones for the Millions": O. C. Marsh vs Edward Drinker Cope in the GReat Dinosaur Rush
4. "Bigger and Better Eggs": Roy Chapman Andrews, Walter GRanger and the Fossil Fields of Mongolia
5. "A New Theory, A Heresy": Robert Bakker and the Dinosaur Success Story
6. "Embryos in the Egg and Newborns in their Nests": John Horner and the "Good Mother Dinosaur"

A Note on the Geologic Time Scale
Selected Bibliography
Internet Resources
Index