The Monster's Bones

The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World

De: David K. Randall

Narrado por: Roman Howell

In the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars, two vastly different men emerge with a mission to fill the empty halls of New York's struggling American Museum of Natural History: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a socialite whose reputation rests on the museum's success, and intrepid Kansas-born fossil hunter Barnum Brown.

When Brown unearths the first Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils in the Montana wilderness, forever changing the world of paleontology, Osborn sees a path to save his museum from irrelevancy. With four-foot-long jaws capable of crushing the bones of its prey and hips that powered the animal to run at speeds of twenty-five miles per hour, the T. Rex suggests a prehistoric ecosystem more complex than anyone imagined. As the public turns out in droves to cower before this bone-chilling giant of the past and wonder at the mysteries of its disappearance, Brown and Osborn together turn dinosaurs from a biological oddity into a beloved part of culture.

The Monster's Bones journeys from prehistory to present day, from remote Patagonia to the badlands of the American West to the penthouses of Manhattan. With a wide-ranging cast of robber barons, eugenicists, and opportunistic cowboys, New York Times bestselling author David K. Randall reveals how a monster of a bygone era ignited a new understanding of our planet and our place within it.

©2022 David K. Randall (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

So much padding

A mildly enjoyable tale that could have been a fine book at half the length. There’s so much padding! And yet it leaves out so much, too, such as the actual day-to-day work of early paleontology. We don’t learn how many people were involved in the digs, where the workers came from, sources of funding, ownership of land from which the bones are dug, or how modern paleontologists judge the early work, etc. etc. Instead we get endless speculation about what long-dead people “must have been” thinking and feeling. The narrator over-enunciates oddly, and puts on strange accents inconsistently, but at least he read the book beforehand and puts emphasis in the right places.

Beautiful bones

If you’ve ever seen a kid or been a kid, you likely love dinosaurs. This fun, informative, and well-read book tells the story of Barnum Brown, a dramatic fossil hunter of the late 1800s/ early 1900s. Barnum is to paleontology what Indiana Jones is to archeology- only real. This book is worth your time.

Good book with misleading title

The titular T. rex does not make an appearance until you get 6 hours into the book. This is not a bad thing. I study sauropods and found the stories of the Carnegie and AMNH's (American Museum of Natural History) quest for the biggest dinosaurs (all sauropods) to be at least as interesting as the T. rex material. It does go to show that Tyrannosaurus will always be the marquee even if it doesn't feature in but about 30% of your book! This book is primarily a biography of Barnum Brown and his work as a fossil collector and his boss at the AMNH, Henry Fairfield Osborn. It also highlights what could be called a second bone war between the Carnegie Museum and the AMNH. I agree with others that the reader's inflections make you think you're listening to a children's book at times but the story kept me engaged.

Interesting Story & Dreadful Narration

The narration is astonishingly poor, however the information was interesting and the anecdotes shared in an interesting way.

Can't continue listening because narrator is terri

Narrator was detrimental to story, I cannot listen any more, he takes away from