The Bone Museum: Travels in the lost worlds of dinosaurs and birds by Wayne
Grady, Four Walls Eight Windows, US$24.95, ISBN 1568582048
THERE are surprisingly few bones in The Bone Museum. Judging from
Advertisement
his narrative, Canadian nature writer Wayne Grady is more interested in
palaeontologists, the countryside, and the hunt for fossils than in the
dinosaurs themselves.
There are compensations for this. Like the American writer and essayist of
geology John McPhee, Grady writes elegantly, and insightfully about interesting
people. The two leading palaeontologists in his narrative, Phil Currie and
Rodolfo Coria, are vital figures. They have both made tremendous contributions
to understanding dinosaurs. In one scene, Grady shows the two of them at the
point of discovery. They are measuring a leg bone and realising that they had
just uncovered the world鈥檚 biggest meat-eating dinosaur on an Argentine
ranch.
As in real life, those moments of discovery are few and far between. For
every Eureka moment months are spent trudging through bleak badlands and
removing rock. Like McPhee, at his best Grady evokes the immensity of geologic
time, but at his worst he loses focus. He tells us too little about dinosaurs,
and much too much about the books he read while waiting for someone to show up
or the rain to stop. He tells engaging stories and he tells them well, but too
often he veers off the subject, a traveller distracted by the sometimes-mundane
scenery from his exotic destination.