The second jurassic dinosaur rush: museums and paleontology in America at the turn of the twentieth century by Paul D. Brinkman. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010. No. of pages: xiv + 345. Price: US$49.00. ISBN 978-0-226-07472-6 (hardback).
✍ Scribed by Stephen K. Donovan
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2011
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 41 KB
- Volume
- 47
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0072-1050
- DOI
- 10.1002/gj.1305
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This well written volume reads like a thriller and will fascinate any reader. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, teams of field geologists were collecting new dinosaur fossils in profusion from Colorado, Wyoming and neighbouring states in the western USA. The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush tells the tale of three of the major natural history museums in the USA, and their pursuit of more and better fossil dinosaurs, particularly sauropods, mainly from the Jurassic. Two of them, the American Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, had egotistical champions for dinosaur palaeontology, namely Henry Fairfield Osborn and William Jacob Holland, who threw money at field parties in the western states. And they got their fossils. The third, the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, had no such promoter, so field collecting was run on a shoestring, and could never compete with New York and Pittsburgh. It got what it deserved in the endthe posterior half of an Apatosaurus.
This book is well produced as is typical of the University of Chicago Press. The text is highly readable and the illustrations, including many period photographs, entirely relevant. Indeed, the photographs left me wanting more; I presume others are available. A book of illustrations covering the same 'story' as The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush would be a fascinating contribution to the history of science. My only complaint would be two strange sentences in the first few pages of Chapter 1, probably errors of typesetting.
Books on the history of geology typically have three components in unequal quantities, namely the people, the rocks (or fossils) and the ideas. This book is resplendent with a cast of characters who