The Bookcase

Finding the First T Rex

by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld (Random House, 2008)
Finding the First T Rex

What's your favorite thing in the museum? The dinosaurs, of course! This is the story of one of the first American dinosaur hunters, Barnum Brown, who was hired to go out and find some big scary dinosaurs for the Museum of Natural History in New York, so visitors would not be too bored by all the cases of dead beetles. Back then, around 1900, working for a big museum could be like an Indiana Jones movie. The museums competed with each other to get the best bones for their museum before another museum got them, and they got up to all kinds of sneaky tricks.  Barnum Brown was particularly good at finding dinos out in the badlands of Wyoming and Montana, and he was pretty sneaky, although always honorable. He dug up several Triceratops and Apatosaurus, and one day he found a huge jawbone full of long, sharp teeth. It took him several years to find the rest of the skeleton, but when he did, it was a new species of huge meat-eating dino—our old friend T. rex. Think of being the very first person to see those enormous teeth!