King of the Dinosaur Hunters
-
- $38.99
-
- $38.99
Publisher Description
Every year millions of museum visitors marvel at the skeletons of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures discovered by John Bell Hatcher whose life is every bit as fascinating as the mighty bones and fossils he unearthed. Hatcher helped discover and mount much of the Carnegie Museum's world famous, 150 million-year-old skeleton of Diplodocus, whose skeleton has captivated our collective imaginations for over a century. But that wasn’t all Hatcher discovered. During a now legendary collecting campaign in Wyoming, Hatcher discovered a 66 million-year-old horned dinosaur, Torosaurus, as well as the first scientifically significant set of skeletons from its evolutionary cousin, Triceratops. Refusing to restrict his talents to enormous dinosaurs, he also discovered the first significant sample of mammal teeth from our relatives that lived 66 million years ago. The teeth might have been minute, but this extraordinary discovery filled a key gap in humanity’s own evolutionary history.Nearly one hundred and twenty-five years after Hatcher’s monumental “hunts” ended, acclaimed paleontologist Lowell Dingus invites us to revisit Hatcher’s captivating expeditions and marvel at this real-life Indiana Jones and the vital role he played in our understanding of paleontology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While it's true that John Bell Hatcher (1861 1904) was one of the 19th century's most prolific fossil hunters, this deeply flawed biography by Dingus (Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex, coauthor), an American Museum of Natural History research associate, does little to reveal his subject's humanity or mystique. Although Dingus provides excruciating detail about the many fossils Hatcher collected throughout western North America and shipped back to Yale, Princeton, and the Carnegie Museum beginning in 1884, virtually no information is presented about any other collector, so the reader lacks any context to judge Hatcher's record. Much of the material presented arises from Hatcher's letters to his employers, dealing with mundane matters like salaries and reimbursements for himself and his assistants and conveying little of the excitement of scientific discovery. Remarkably few personal facts appear it isn't until a full year after the fact that Dingus reveals Hatcher was married, and not until the penultimate chapter that he had seven children, three of whom died before the age of four. The book does give paleontology enthusiasts a sense of the challenges involved in 19th-century fossil hunting, at least in Hatcher's case, but leaves them with little insight into the man himself.
