The Best Pieces from Different Skeletons

David K. Randall | The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How it Shook Our World | W. W. Norton | 2022 | 288 Pages

Jill Hunting | For Want of Wings: A Bird with Teeth and a Dinosaur in the Family | University of Oklahoma Press | 2022 | 260 Pages

Of the five million people who walk through the doors of the American Museum of Natural History each year (pre-pandemic figure), few probably give much thought to Kansas. As they gaze, awestruck, at the hulking form of the Tyrannosaurus rex that is the museum’s crown jewel, they are more likely to picture a lush prehistoric landscape than the dusty turn-of-the-century plains environment from which the remains came. But, as two recent books make clear, the paleontological triumphs of America’s museums—and the lives of the men who uncovered them—have deep roots in Kansas and other Great Plains states. 

Sparked by journalist David K. Randall’s kindergarten-aged son’s question “Who found these dinosaurs?”—proof that the queries of children might be the best place for historical inquiry to begin—The Monster’s Bones traces the quest for dinosaur skeletons from the Bone Wars of the 1870s to the pop culture influence of T. rex through the mid-twentieth century. Randall focuses on the life and work of Barnum Brown, the Kansas-born field paleontologist who uncovered the world’s first Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in 1902 and delivered it to his employer, Henry Fairfield Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). 

The book functions largely as a dual biography of the two men. Brown, the son of a Kansas farmer, uses his local knowledge, near-manic work ethic, and “innate sense” for fossil positions to trade life in a tiny Kansas town for that of a cosmopolitan playboy. Osborn, the privileged but underperforming son of wealthy New Yorkers, uses his family’s money and connections to take charge of the AMNH’s vertebrate paleontology department. Despite his resources, Osborn depends on Brown’s successes in the field as he desperately seeks a skeleton impressive enough to draw crowds to the ambitious but struggling new museum.

Where Randall focuses on central figures in the history of American paleontology, editor and writer Jill Hunting’s For Want of Wings instead centers one of its bit players—Thomas Russell, whose single paleontology field expedition as a student at Yale unearthed a complete fossil of Hesperornis regalis, a species that demonstrates an evolutionary connection between birds and reptiles. Though Russell’s paleontology career was brief, he is Hunting’s great-grandfather, and For Want of Wings follows her attempts to uncover this fascinating moment of family history and its legacy, to situate her own family’s story in the expanse of American history, and to do a bit of self-discovery as she retraces her ancestor’s steps in Kansas.

Despite their shared focus on the history of fossil hunting, the books offer contrasting approaches to considering the past. The Monster’s Bones is an engaging, straightforward narrative history, full of intriguing characters, descriptive scenes, and all the beats of discouragement and victory that one might hope to find. Yet the book is also a thoughtful, thorough account. Randall—drawing the cultural connection between Barnum Brown and his namesake, P.T. Barnum—emphasizes the inextricable link between science and spectacle in paleontology, and the lasting impact of Brown’s discoveries on both paleontology and pop culture are clear. Russell is also attentive to the nuanced connections between class, social status, and scientific collecting, and makes good work of the complicated relationship between Brown and Osborn, field scientists and privileged patrons. Both men’s personal failings are also on display here, complicating the otherwise triumphant narrative. This is especially true in Randall’s emphasis on Osborn’s racism, his turn toward eugenics and his aggressive promotion of eugenic ideas, and the way his “caustic racial influence” suffused the creation of the AMNH and its exhibits.  

Randall is less sensitive to the nuances of the American West, reflecting mostly uncritically the mythologies about the region that the book’s figures espoused. Randall repeatedly positions the “frontier” against the “modern world” of the eastern United States, overlooking the way that the country’s western expansion was an essential component of that world. Though The Monster’s Bones does not ignore the presence of Indigenous peoples in the West, the narrative seems to echo the beliefs of its white historical actors that they were part of an “Old West” that was fading away. In other cases, however, Randall’s analysis is more insightful. He subtly but effectively underscores the parallel and interconnected developments in the country’s dependence on fossil fuels and its unearthing of fossils themselves, for example. Like the display of dinosaur fossils that Randall describes, The Monster’s Bones effectively presents the past in a blend of information and entertainment and should reward fans of history and dinosaurs alike, despite its minor shortcomings. 

Hunting takes a different tack, creating an account that is more collage than portrait. History, she argues, “is dynamic, fluid, and alive,” as well as “nonlinear, complex, and adaptive.” For Want of Wings reflects this philosophy. Although Hunting is primarily interested in understanding Russell’s experience on the 1872 Yale College Scientific Expedition, she takes readers first through a family history that stretches back to Connecticut’s early Anglo settlers. She describes ancestors who might have owned slaves and later generations who were staunch advocates for abolition, even helping to fund settlement in the contested state of Kansas long before Tom Russell arrived there to dig for dinosaurs. She weaves together visits to Yale’s Peabody Museum, research on historic clothing and images, and her and her daughter’s own visit to Kansas, where they attempt to revisit the place their relative once traveled. There are appearances by a present-day quilting club, Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud, and even Barnum Brown and Henry Osborn in a narrative that resists straightforward timelines or narrow focus. Where Randall’s labor as researcher and narrator is nearly invisible, Hunting brings the reader alongside her as she attempts to reconstruct her relative’s past. 

Hunting’s approach has its pitfalls. While some of her explorations bring welcome nuance and texture to her account, the benefit of others is unclear. Her interview with a set of triplets about their love of the children’s show Dinosaur Train is a playful way to demonstrate both the far-reaching appeal of paleontology and the more expansive futures that girls today get to imagine. A page-and-a-half digression on the history of Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, on the other hand, has no clear relevance to the narrative. Yielding to a temptation that faces many family history enthusiasts, Hunting delves into more detail about the Russell family’s past than a reader necessarily needs. Hunting also tends to shy away from analysis where more would be welcome, leaving research and anecdotes assembled in a way that often feels more haphazard than intentional. Although pitched as “part detective history, part memoir,” the memoir component of For Want of Wings seems underdeveloped; although we learn that Hunting and her daughter are both on the brink of new directions in their lives, it’s hard not to wonder if Hunting was reluctant to write more about their internal states, or if she just didn’t have much to say.

Among the strengths of For Want of Wings is the author’s refusal to slip into easy contrasts between eastern and western America or to accept the mythology of the American West as readily as Randall does. In Hunting’s account, the role of the federal government and military in supporting Indigenous displacement and Western settlement and providing supplies and guidance for researchers reflects contemporary scholarship on the American West. As she explores the Yale expeditions, Hunting shows a Great Plains and east coast that were intimately connected rather than impossibly separate, each influencing the development of the other. Even Hunting’s visits to Kansas in the present yield a more complicated cultural and political landscape. There, Hunting’s daughter, a climate activist, feels uneasy in a beef-promoting diner even as the hum of wind turbines provides a soundtrack. Still, Hunting occasionally stumbles on her own myths about the modern rural Midwest. “You can tell I’m from California, because I ask about the food,” she tells a dining companion at one point. Without elaboration, her statement carries a curious implication that the people of Kansas do not share her interest in where their food comes from or how it is prepared. 

In some ways, this awkward moment  points to the odd position of Kansas—and the Great Plains more broadly—in both books as less of a place in its own right, and more of a stage for both books’ protagonists. For Randall’s Barnum Brown, Kansas serves as a trap from which an ambitious young man must escape, but only after it has taught him the survival skills and local landscape knowledge that will bring him success among the scientific elite. Ranchers and other rural laborers who assist Brown—sometimes even pointing him toward likely fossil sites—go mostly unnamed. For Hunting’s Russell, Kansas is a proving ground for a privileged scion of an elite New England family, a young man’s dalliance with adventure before returning to his future as a doctor. Even for Hunting and her daughter, Kansas provides a backdrop for escape and reflection as they both decide how to move forward in their lives. If Kansas is “the birthplace of American paleontology,” as one paleontologist recently told High Plains Public Radio reporter David Condos, its chroniclers seem almost as eager to leave it behind as Barnum Brown was.

Randall’s The Monster’s Bones might make for a more satisfying and informative read, but Hunting brings a degree of emotional and historical complexity in her approach to For Want of Wings that I wish more narrative history made room for. What it lacks in focus it begins to make up for in surprise, uncertainty, and spontaneity that the narrative arcs we often impose on history tend to lack. In the end, I found myself wishing for a history that followed Henry Osborn’s technique for displaying the T. rex to best effect: assembling the best pieces from different skeletons to create a more satisfying whole, “a display that was both the remnants of once-living creatures and a sculpture built with human hands.”