THE EXTREMELY PATIENT BARNUM BROWN: 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
🗓️ 28 April 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 ALLLOSAURUS
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island? |
| 0:03.8 | Jane Gaskin did exactly that, |
| 0:06.2 | trading in the family home to begin a new life in the tropics. |
| 0:09.9 | But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise, |
| 0:17.8 | the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder. |
| 0:23.0 | Wish you were here. |
| 0:24.0 | Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever you listen to podcasts. This is |
| 0:37.6 | This is CBSi in the world. I'm John Bachelor with David Randall. His new book is The Monsters Bones. This is the search for T-Rex. It is now 1873 and a child is born in Carbondale, Kansas. He is given an unusual |
| 0:49.0 | name, however, by his older brother. David, how is it that an older brother gets to name a younger brother? |
| 0:56.0 | Have you ever had that experience? |
| 0:58.0 | No, and as a younger brother, I'm glad I didn't. |
| 1:02.0 | But so this was a time where the Barnums, they were, the Browns, I mean, I'm sorry, the Browns, they were relatively |
| 1:09.4 | prosperous. They're still farmers though, so they're not rich by the standards of a city and they |
| 1:15.4 | take their six-year-old son Frank up to the big city of Topeka and they go to |
| 1:22.0 | PT Barnum's great traveling worlds fair and you know this is a six-year-old you can't get this out of his mind it's the most amazing thing he's ever seen in Kansas so six weeks later his younger brother is born and his parents couldn't decide on a name right away. |
| 1:37.0 | They'd already named both their older daughters after family so that seemed to close that avenue. |
| 1:42.0 | So Frank Birch said and yelled, |
| 1:44.0 | let's call him Barnum. |
| 1:46.0 | And you know his parents, they thought there and they looked to each other |
| 1:50.0 | and it didn't seem like it fit the showmanship of Pet.T. Barnum in the flat lands of Kansas, but for some reason it stuck. |
| 1:56.2 | And suddenly you had Barnum Brown ready to face the world. |
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