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The John Batchelor Show

THE EXTREMELY PATIENT BARNUM BROWN: 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

🗓️ 28 April 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

THE EXTREMELY PATIENT BARNUM BROWN: 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.

1921

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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. Wish you were here. Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever

0:26.7

you listen to podcasts.

0:30.3

This is CVS, I in the World, I'm John Bachelor with David Randall.

0:38.0

David Kay Randall's new book is The Monsters Bones, The Discovery of T-RexRex and how it shook our world.

0:45.1

We're following our protagonist, our hero, Mr. Bones.

0:49.4

Barnum Brown, he has been dispatched by his superior at the American Museum of Natural History.

0:56.8

To go out west and find me bigger and bigger monster bones.

1:01.5

We're in competition with Carnegie himself. I must deliver

1:04.9

eyeballs. I must get people into this museum. In 1901 he go and in

1:11.5

1900 he goes to Wyoming. In 1901 he goes to Wyoming.

1:13.6

In 1901, he goes to Colorado.

1:16.6

These are okay expeditions, but they're not what they need.

1:21.0

They're not something new.

1:22.4

They're not something that they can use the word monster and convince the newspaper writers who are

1:28.0

following this bones race that's underway. Now we come to

1:33.2

1902 and like a great Hollywood mystery there's a photograph

1:38.2

a man named Hornaday who eventually becomes I believe the Bronx

...

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