NATURAL MUSEUM WARS: 2/4: The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World Hardcover by David K. Randall (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Bones-Discovery-Shook-World/dp/1324006536
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 privileged 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 25 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.
Vivid and engaging, The Monster’s Bones journeys from prehistory to present day, from remote Patagonia to the unforgiving 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 best-selling author David K. Randall reveals how a monster of a bygone era ignited a new understanding of our planet and our place within it.
1911 CRO-MAGNON MAN.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone this is James Harkin and Anna Tashinsky two writers of the TV show |
| 0:05.2 | QI and two-fourths of the hit podcast no such thing as a fish. |
| 0:09.2 | We'd like to let you know that we've written a book it It is called everything to play for. The most |
| 0:14.4 | interesting things there are to know about the world of sports. It's for you |
| 0:18.2 | whether you like sports or not. Did you know that legendary cricketer Gary Sobers scored his final century while drunk? |
| 0:25.7 | Or that games of lacrosse used to involve 100,000 players. |
| 0:31.7 | Learn that and so much more by getting everything to play for, the QI Book of Sports, available |
| 0:36.2 | in all bookshops and online right now. |
| 0:40.0 | This is |
| 0:43.4 | in the world. I'm John Bachelor with David Randall. His new book is The |
| 0:47.3 | Monsters. This is the search for T-Rex. |
| 0:50.1 | It is now 1873 and a child is born in Carbondale, Kansas. He is given an unusual |
| 0:58.6 | name, however, by his older brother. David, how is it that an older brother gets to name a younger brother? |
| 1:05.6 | Have you ever had that experience? |
| 1:08.0 | No, and as a younger brother, I'm glad I didn't. |
| 1:12.0 | But so this was a time where the Barnums they were the |
| 1:16.6 | Browns I'm sorry the Browns they were relatively prosperous they're still |
| 1:20.5 | farmers though so they're not rich by the standards of a city. |
| 1:24.3 | And they take their six-year-old son Frank up to the big city of Topeka, |
| 1:30.8 | and they go to PT Barnum's great traveling world's fair and you know this is a six-year-old |
| 1:36.3 | you can't get this out of his mind it's the most amazing thing he's ever seen in |
| 1:39.3 | Kansas. So six weeks later his younger brother is born and his parents couldn't decide on a name right away |
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