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The Bone Museum: Travels in the lost worlds of dinosaurs and birds by Wayne

Grady, Four Walls Eight Windows, US$24.95, ISBN 1568582048

THERE are surprisingly few bones in The Bone Museum. Judging from

his narrative, Canadian nature writer Wayne Grady is more interested in

palaeontologists, the countryside, and the hunt for fossils than in the

dinosaurs themselves.

There are compensations for this. Like the American writer and essayist of

geology John McPhee, Grady writes elegantly, and insightfully about interesting

people. The two leading palaeontologists in his narrative, Phil Currie and

Rodolfo Coria, are vital figures. They have both made tremendous contributions

to understanding dinosaurs. In one scene, Grady shows the two of them at the

point of discovery. They are measuring a leg bone and realising that they had

just uncovered the world’s biggest meat-eating dinosaur on an Argentine

ranch.

As in real life, those moments of discovery are few and far between. For

every Eureka moment months are spent trudging through bleak badlands and

removing rock. Like McPhee, at his best Grady evokes the immensity of geologic

time, but at his worst he loses focus. He tells us too little about dinosaurs,

and much too much about the books he read while waiting for someone to show up

or the rain to stop. He tells engaging stories and he tells them well, but too

often he veers off the subject, a traveller distracted by the sometimes-mundane

scenery from his exotic destination.