meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
The John Batchelor Show

NATURAL MUSEUM WARS: 3/4: 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

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2024

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

NATURAL MUSEUM WARS: 3/4: The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World Hardcover by David K. Randall (Author)

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.

1845

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Spark your creativity with the Sims. Sometimes you might feel like you're not creative

0:07.0

and you have to go in search of your creative spark again. Maybe this is catching up with creative

0:11.9

friends, experimenting with a new look or trying out a new recipe.

0:16.0

And thanks to The Sims, inspiration is just one game and one spark away.

0:21.0

Ready to spark something? Download the Sims 4 and play for free. This is CBS, I in the World, I'm John Bachelor with David Randall.

0:36.0

David K Randall's new book is The Monsters Bones, The Discovery of T-Rex and How It Sh shook our world. We're following our

0:43.9

protagonist our hero Mr. Bones. Barnum Brown, he has been dispatched by his

0:50.8

Superior at the American Museum of Natural History to go out west and find me bigger

0:57.9

and bigger monster bones.

0:59.5

We're in competition with Carnegie himself.

1:02.1

I must deliver eyeballs. I must get people into this museum.

1:06.5

In 1901 he goes to Wyoming. In 1901 he goes to Colorado. These are okay expeditions but they're not

1:18.0

what they need. They're not something new. They're not something that they can use the word monster and convince the new. They're not something that they can use the word monster and convince the newspaper writers

1:25.8

who are following this bones race that's underway.

1:30.6

Now we come to 1992 and like a great Hollywood mystery there's a photograph a man

1:36.9

named Hornaday who eventually becomes I believe the Bronx Zoo sponsor and a photograph taken by a man named Seaber.

1:46.0

Who is Seaber? Who is Hornaday and how do these clues come to Barnum Brown David?

1:51.0

So Hornaday is traveling through Montana and this is a time

1:55.4

when Montana is pretty much as far away from the life of the East Coast as you can think. It really feels like it's a different world.

2:05.6

Essentially you're traveling to Australia or something. And Hornetay is out there to

2:10.2

document some of the life, dear and other life, natural life, that he comes across.

2:15.2

And he reaches a farm of a man named Max Heber. And Seber says, you know, if you're looking for for natural life, you should see this, what I have out here.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.