Barnum's Bones was a really neat story of a historical figure I'd never heard of before. Since my five-year-old is a dinosaur enthusiast, we both enjoyed this story about the man who discovered the first documented Tyrannosaurus skeleton.

Barnum Brown seems an almost larger-than-life figure as his obsession with fossils compels him to attend school, become a paleontologist, and spend his life searching all over the world for as many fossils as he can "sniff out." But what he really wants is to discover something new -- something that will make the American Museum of Natural History proud.

While it doesn't happen immediately (and the process is especially slow since it was limited to turn-of-the-twentieth-century technology -- horses, wagons, and trains), he does eventually discover the bottom half (ish) of a Tyrannosaurus, but it is several years later before he gets back to a nearby spot and finally finds the enormous head. What it must have been like to be an ordinary person in those days and be astounded at these new kinds of discoveries! 

Scrounged From: Our local library

Format: Hardcover
Author: Tracey Fern
Illustrator: Boris Kulikov
Pages: 36
Content Advisory: None

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