Dinosaur Mountain: Digging Into the Jurassic Age

I read the daily reports on the current ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and I think about how it is going to take the Best and the Brightest of this and the next couple of generations to possibly mitigate the catastrophic and interrelated environmental problems that continue to stack up around and above our planet like a house of cards. Unfortunately, it's the only house we've all got, the only hand we're being dealt, and we either address these problems in a serious manner pronto or the game is going to be over. We need exceptional science curriculums in our schools and we need to persuade lots of our most talented young people that science is an exciting frontier awaiting them. We also need great books like DINOSAUR MOUNTAIN: DIGGING INTO THE JURASSIC AGE. DINOSAUR MOUNTAIN, the story of Earl Douglass' discovery, a century ago, of a mother lode of dinosaur bones in eastern Utah, is science and biography writing for children at its finest. You have the excitement of finding seventy-foot long dinosaur skeletons. You have the danger of working with TNT, living in tents in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes working in temperatures of forty degrees below zero. You have great explanations -- with accompanying illustrations -- of how the work of excavating and preserving these fragile bones was actually conducted. And you have a great photo on the back cover of Earl Douglass. I adore this photo. He's in front of a wall of sandstone marked with grids, with his hand on a bone that's almost as long as he is tall. You look at this friendly guy with a sparkle in his eye and a hammer in his (other) hand and you can just imagine how cool it would have been to talk with a guy like this -- a rock star of bone hunters -- or how amazing it would be to actually be Earl Douglass. He was a guy who so believed in his work that he was able to persuade the then-President to preserve the rocks into which he was digging so that none of these priceless scientific treasures would be lost. (The area in which Douglass made all of his astounding discoveries eventually became a tiny corner of what is now the 210,000 acre Dinosaur National Monument.) Then Douglass' benefactor, Andrew Carnegie, died and Douglass continued on with his work without pay for the next five years. How alive he must have felt to work that hard with that sort of passion. Author and illustrator Deborah Kogan Ray does an exceptional job of setting the stage for Douglass' discoveries by telling the story of the decades-earlier rivalry -- that came to be known as the Bone Wars -- between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. We read how Douglass learned from the mistakes of the earlier bone hunters by being more methodical in his excavation and preservation procedures so as to insure that the right bones would be connected to each other when they were duplicated for assembly and viewing in natural history museums. All of this storytelling

Crowds of people were amazed at the dinosaur skeleton they saw at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. It was 1868 and it was like nothing they had ever seen before. Each individual had to gaze a full three stories high to see the skull of the amazing dinosaur. The curators of the museum had hoped that interest in dinosaurs would be sparked by this exhibit and they certainly weren't disappointed. Anxious to find additional dinosaur skeletons to exhibit curators and bone hunters alike sparked what became known as the "Bone Wars." By 1877 the Bone Wars were becoming heated when site after site in the West uncovered "huge dinosaur bones." "Bone hunters" (paleontologists) were anxious to not only garner large numbers of bones, but also fame. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh had the distinction of being two of the best bone hunters. Their relationship was not a partnership, but rather a rivalry in which they "are said to have stooped to underhanded methods, including spying, bribery, and even hijacking fossil shipments bound back east for each other's museums." It was a "dinosaur craze" that even the likes of Andrew Carnegie could not resist. In this book you will read about Earl Douglass, a quiet, but persistent fossil hunter and expert, how he methodically searched for bones, you'll get to see drawings of ancient fossilized creatures, you'll read about Dr. William Holland and "Dad Goodrich" who joined Douglass, their amazing discoveries, you'll get glimpses of Earl's diary, and much more! This is an amazing tale of discovery that will rivet the young, curious dinosaur lover. Many books, that keep the dino lover's attention, focus on the dinosaurs themselves, but few seem to discuss the actual discovery of their fossilized remains. I enjoyed the conversational style this book took and learned quite a bit about the "Bone Wars," something I was unfamiliar with. The art work has a bit of an old West aura about it that sends the reader back in time, once again to experience the thrill of discovery. There are numerous informative sidebars and diagrams that will interest the reader. In the back of the book are drawings of Jurassic dinosaurs discovered, brief paragraphs about them, information about the Dinosaur National Monument, a glossary, a bibliography and additional biographical information on Douglass and Carnegie.