David K. Randall

David K. Randall reports on scientific history through the people and institutions that shaped it. The Monster’s Bones recounts the discovery and cultural rise of Tyrannosaurus rex through fossil hunter Barnum Brown, museum director Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the institutions that competed to display prehistoric life. W. W. Norton published the book, which moves from field expeditions in Patagonia and the American West to museum politics and public fascination in New York. Randall is also the author of Dreamland, Black Death at the Golden Gate, and The King and Queen of Malibu. His reporting has appeared in major newspapers, and he has worked as a senior reporter for Reuters. The Monster’s Bones treats paleontology as both scientific inquiry and a human contest over evidence, prestige, funding, and spectacle. That approach makes museum building and fossil interpretation as important to the narrative as the dinosaur itself.