The Dinosaur that made Dinosaurs cool

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, natural history, paleontology, t rex, tyrannosaurus rex

From left to right: Stan, an exceptionally large skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex ("T rex" to almost everybody), shown just before the auction at Christie's in 2020 where it was bought for $31.8 million dollars by an unknown client, almost certainly from the Middle East; A T rex as seen in the film Jurassic World; and an inflatable T rex costume.

In 1990, due to a flat tire, dinosaur hunter Sue Hutchinson stumbled across a bone; when it was unearthed, it was found to be part of Sue, at that time the largest and most complete T rex to be found. Very public legal wrangling culminated in a court declaring Maurice Williams the owner and in 1994 the bones were auctioned by Sotheby's for more than $8 million (this price and the prior one include the commission of the auction house). Once cleaned and mounted, Sue was put on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Do you wonder why the Arabs waited around to buy a T rex skeleton, ultimately paying four times as much? Arabs are the ultimate male chauvinists. They would never spring for the skeleton of a dominant female predator! I learned the story of how, years earlier, Mobil had to modify their logo for advertising in Saudi Arabia. The logo is a rearing, winged horse, but with a sexless underside. The Arabs insisted that it had to have a visible penis to show it is a stallion. Stan is definitely male.

Long before Sue Hutchinson and others discovered skeletons of T rex that now number about 50, Barnum Brown discovered the first known fossils of T rex in Montana in early August, 1902. He spent nearly two months excavating the bones and sent them by train to New York. In the next few years he found two more T rex skeletons. Brown had already long been known as the best of the bone hunters, a title that was now vindicated in spades.

The fascinating stories that surround these discoveries, and what they meant to science and society, are told artfully by David K Randall in The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. rex and how it Shook the World.

The book traces the history of dinosaurs as known to science, first from the "Bones of Giants" discovered in England: a fish-lizard-like skeleton was dug out in 1811 by Mary Anning, age 12, and caused no little debate and ire among scientists in Britain and on the Continent. The scientific name Ichthyosaurus indicates the resemblance. Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur" in 1842. The discovery of immense dinosaur bones and near-complete skeletons in western America led to the "bone wars" of the 1870's and -80's, attached to the names Cope and Marsh, whose fierce rivalry bankrupted both rich men.

Barnum Brown, named for P.T. Barnum based on a whim of his older brother, came along, a few years after the bone war died down. He got into the field of fossil hunting almost by accident. His powers of observation, plus his great physical strength and endurance, came to the attention of Henry Fairfield Osborne of the American Museum of Natural History, which still has many of Brown's discoveries on display. After a rocky start, Brown and Osborne went on to work together for forty years.

Along the way we learn of the many powerful trustees and curators of American museums, primarily in the eastern states, who carried on a more genteel, but equally fierce bone war, mostly at a distance, funding crews to find more and better and bigger skeletons. They are all portrayed by the author as first-class jerks, sure of their superiority, and all of them filthy rich. Perhaps they were infinite jerks, perhaps not.

The first curator of the Delaware Museum of Natural History, R Tucker Abbott, was described to me by someone who once worked for him as "very sure of himself." I guess that's stop one on the way to consummate jerkiness. But he had competition. His boss, the founder of the museum, John E DuPont, kept the museum private for its first seven years. He had no interest in enthralling the public.

By about 1900, a freshly-displayed skeleton of Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus could bring multitudes (of paying customers) into a museum for a month or two, but interest would soon die down. Both scientists and the public came to think of all the terrestrial dinosaurs as giant cows: slow, stupid, lumbering beasts about as interesting as a barn. In murals of the time they are shown half-submerged in swamps, where the water could support their immense weight.

The discovery of a seven-ton predatory dinosaur changed all that. It took years to prepare the first mounted T rex, which was actually cobbled together from parts of all three of Brown's initial discoveries. Once it was put on display in 1916, the public went wild. Fast-forward 106 years: the public is still wild about T rex! Witness the popularity of T rex inflatable costumes, as shown above right. Nobody cares to have a costume of a Hadrosaur (a duck-billed herbivore, and considered a two-legged cow). Predators have more mojo than prey.

As a child I had a set of 20 or so plastic dinosaur models, all about 3-4" long. I loved them all, but I recall that the T rex had a special place in my heart. Such sets were the favored "action figures" of my generation in the 1950's.

The book gives rather short shrift to the years after Brown found the skeletons of "the king". After that, what do you do for an encore? There are some touching (and some not-so-much) events of Brown's family history in later years, when he became able to loosen up with his daughter. Her mother had died when she was very young, shattering Brown's world. She was raised by her mother's parents, and seldom saw her father.

Brown lived to age 89. He'd been retired at age 65…most companies had mandatory retirement at that age. But he was afforded an office at the American Museum of Natural History and the title Emeritus for the following 24 years.

Would dinosaurs be so popular today if Barnum Brown never found the first T rex? I think someone else would have, within a year or two, and the current popularity of dinosaurs, and their king, would be the same. But this book would be about that someone else.