5 June 2010 DINOSAUR MOUNTAIN: DIGGING INTO THE JURASSIC AGE by Deborah Kogan Ray, Frances Foster Books/Farrar Straus Giroux, April 2010, 40p., ISBN: 978-0-374-31789-8

"I know that lives are at stake

Yours and mine and our descendents in time

There's so much to gain and so much to lose

Everyone of us has to choose"

-- (now-Congressman) John Hall, "Power"

I read the daily reports on the current ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and I think about how it is going to take the Best and the Brightest of this and the next couple of generations to possibly mitigate the catastrophic and interrelated environmental problems that continue to stack up around and above our planet like a house of cards.  Unfortunately, it's the only house we've all got, the only hand we're being dealt, and we either address these problems in a serious manner pronto or the game is going to be over.  

We need exceptional science curriculums in our schools and we need to persuade lots of our most talented young people that science is an exciting frontier awaiting them.  We also need great books like DINOSAUR MOUNTAIN: DIGGING INTO THE JURASSIC AGE.

DINOSAUR MOUNTAIN, the story of Earl Douglass' discovery, a century ago, of a mother lode of dinosaur bones in eastern Utah, is science and biography writing for children at its finest.  You have the excitement of finding seventy-foot long dinosaur skeletons.  You have the danger of working with TNT, living in tents in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes working in temperatures of forty degrees below zero.  You have great explanations -- with accompanying illustrations -- of how the work of excavating and preserving these fragile bones was actually conducted. 

And you have a great photo on the back cover of Earl Douglass.  I adore this photo.  He's in front of a wall of sandstone marked with grids, with his hand on a bone that's almost as long as he is tall.  You look at this friendly guy with a sparkle in his eye and a hammer in his (other) hand and you can just imagine how cool it would have been to talk with a guy like this -- a rock star of bone hunters -- or how amazing it would be to actually be Earl Douglass.  He was a guy who so believed in his work that he was able to persuade the then-President to preserve the rocks into which he was digging so that none of these priceless scientific treasures would be lost.  (The area in which Douglass made all of his astounding discoveries eventually became a tiny corner of what is now the 210,000 acre Dinosaur National Monument.) 

Then Douglass' benefactor, Andrew Carnegie, died and Douglass continued on with his work without pay for the next five years.  How alive he must have felt to work that hard with that sort of passion. 

Author and illustrator Deborah Kogan Ray does an exceptional job of setting the stage for Douglass' discoveries by telling the story of the decades-earlier rivalry -- that came to be known as the Bone Wars -- between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.  We read how Douglass learned from the mistakes of the earlier bone hunters by being more methodical in his excavation and preservation procedures so as to insure that the right bones would be connected to each other when they were duplicated for assembly and viewing in natural history museums.

All of this storytelling is accomplished by the author/illustrator within a text that is sufficiently spare as to leave a full page of every spread free for unobstructed illustration.  There are sidebars that include entries from Douglass' journals.  End matter includes a two-page spread on "The Jurassic Dinosaurs of the Dinosaur National Monument Quarry," a two-page spread on Dinosaur National Monument, further biographical information on Douglass and Carnegie, a glossary, and a bibliography. 

Just think of hiking in that area in late spring and imagining some of these giant bones lying just below the surface under your feet? Or in a wall over your shoulder?  It is going to take a lot of imagination to solve the messes we've gotten ourselves into, and this is exactly the sort of book that will feed young imaginations and inspire young scientists.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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