Books

‘The Monster’s Bones’ looks at the men who made T. Rex king

More biography than scary story.

October 15, 2022

There’s no question that Tyrannosaurus rex occupies a role in the human imagination unequaled by almost any other animal, extinct or extant. A quick survey of 2022 has T. rex featuring prominently in both this summer’s sci-fi blockbuster Jurassic World Dominion and the Apple TV+ documentary Prehistoric Planet. And back in October of 2020, amid a global pandemic that left many economies frozen or in free-fall, a nearly complete T. rex skeleton nicknamed “Stan” managed to sell at auction for a record breaking $31.8 million, to a museum in Abu Dhabi.

Considering all this, it’s surprising there’s no book length examination of the social history of T. rex. How did this particular dinosaur manage to captivate the public? Discovered in 1905 in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, T. rex came to light more than 80-years after the first dinosaur bones were identified, being preceded by many other iconic species like iguanodon, stegosaurus, triceratops, and brontosaurus, and succeeded by many even stranger ones.

T. rex skeleton described in 'The Monster's Bones'

The T. rex skeleton that Brown found, which is actually a composite from three different individuals.

It’s for these reasons that the prospect of journalist David K. Randall’s new book The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. rex and How It Shook Our World (W.W. Norton, 2022) is so exciting. The title promises a lot, but does it deliver?

The Monster’s Bones is written for general audiences rather than academics, and in that aim it’s overwhelmingly, successful with Randall’s prose being easy to read and the page count coming in at 235, not including the bibliography and index. The overall presentation of the book, a hardcover with a dust jacket, is also very nice, capturing something of the Art Deco aesthetic of early 20th century New York, the period and place where much of the book’s action is set. It also features 10 black and white photos as a glossy insert.

Given its short length, readers will undoubtedly be surprised to learn that T. rex doesn’t actually show up until nearly 150 pages into The Monster’s Bones, and doesn’t become the focus of the narrative until about page 200.

So if The Monster’s Bones isn’t actually about T. rex, what is it about? It’s largely about the lives of two men: Barnum Brown and Henry Fairfield Osborn. Brown was a Kansas farm-boy turned adventurer (i.e. spy), fossil hunter, and was the man who discovered the first T. rex bones. Conversely, Osborn was the rich son of a New England railroad baron, a paleontologist, fourth president of the American Museum of Natural History, and T. rex’s earliest and most important promoter.

While some enterprising fossil prospector would have inevitably come across the bones of T. rex, without Brown and Osborn, the so-called King of the Dinosaurs would likely not enjoy the cult of celebrity which surrounds it today. And while biographies of both these men already exist – Ronald Rainger’s An Agenda for Antiquity (2004) on Osborn, and Lowell Dingus and Mark A. Norell’s Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus rex (2010) – neither are aimed at general audiences.

The problem of course is that the discovery of T. rex, while important for the overall history of dinosaurs in both paleontology and popular-culture, only occupies a relatively small portion of both Brown and Osborn’s careers. Randall has wisely saved this episode for The Monster’s Bones‘ climax, while realizing that if he were to only discuss T. rex, his book would undoubtedly suffer from a deficiency of dinosaurs.

So Randall spends most of the first 150 pages running his readers through the labyrinth that is the history of vertebrate paleontology, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s mastodon fetish, the marine reptile fossils of Mary Anning, Gideon and Mary Mantell’s discovery of iguanodon, Sir Richard Owen’s coining of the term dinosaur, Darwin’s South American fossil finds, the Victorian era Bone Wars of Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, Albert Koch’s sea-serpent hoax, and the drama surrounding Andrew Carnegie’s plaster diplodocus. Randall even includes a few digressions not strictly related to paleontology, such as a lengthy discussion of Barnum Brown’s namesake, P.T. Barnum, and his Fiji Mermaid.

Rather than mere padding though, Randall makes this potted history of paleontology highly entertaining, likely because, disclosed in the book’s introduction, the author never underwent a “dinosaur phase” as a child, so writing this book was his first real introduction to the subject. One can feel Randall’s newfound enthusiasm for the history of paleontology spilling across the page, with all the messiness that phrasing implies. For readers equally unfamiliar with this history, The Monster’s Bones is as good an introduction to the subject as any.

Brown and Osborn excavating Diplodocus bones in Wyoming

But what The Monster’s Bones doesn’t do is offer a satisfying explanation as to how T. rex became so popular. The closest Randall gets is the disconcerting linking of Osborn’s belief in a scientific basis for white supremacy and advocacy of eugenics,with his promotion of T. rex as the evolutionary pinnacle of the Mesozoic era. However a look at the book’s bibliography reveals the absence of such sociological studies as W.J.T. Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book (1998) and Brian Noble’s Articulating Dinosaurs (2016), both of which could have helped Randall elucidate this dark side of paleontology.

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.

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