Volume 49, Number 1 · January 17, 2002
Dinosaur Crazy
By Tim Flannery
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW
Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science
by Deborah Cadbury
Henry Holt, 374 pp., $27.50
Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars
by Keith M. Parsons
Indiana University Press, 210 pp., $29.95
Walking on Eggs: The Astonishing Discovery of Thousands of Dinosaur Eggs in the Badlands of Patagonia
by Luis M. Chiappe and Lowell Dingus, with illustrations by Nicholas Frankfurt
Scribner, 219 pp., $25.00
The Road to Chilecito
by James A. Jensen
Launceston, Tasmania: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery 183 pp., $20.00 Australian (paper)
Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Other Fossils from Montana to Mongolia
by Michael J. Novacek
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $26.00 (to be published in February 2002)
Dinosaurs of Darkness
by Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich
Indiana University Press, 222 pp., $35.00
The year 1677 saw Dr. Robert Plot, Professor of Chymistry and first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, struggling with a perplexing mystery. Quarry workers at Cornwell (near what is now Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire) had unearthed an object that to modern eyes looks like the end of a bone from a Flintstones cartoon. Plot correctly identified it as 'a real bone, now petrified' but its size was incredible—'in compass, near the capita femoris,...two foot,' he marveled. It 'must have been the bone of some elephant, brought hither during the government of the Romans in Britain,' concluded the good doctor, who, thankfully for posterity, illustrated the now lost specimen.
Review, 4334 words
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