It all started very suddenly, in the spring of 2008. I was reading magazines in my grandfather's house in New Jersey, and I found that magical Life cover story—"Dinosaurs." Fold-out, full color pictures of heroic creatures. Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex. I discovered an entire world, far, far away in time, that I could visit, whenever I wanted, via the creative labors of the paleontologists. And I made up my mind then and there that I would devote my life to the dinosaurs. Since I was in the fourth grade, my parents weren't alarmed at my vow. Surely, they thought, it's just a phase that he'll grow out of. Lots of kids my age got hooked on dinosaurs for a while—it was a childhood disease, like mumps or chicken pox, and if left alone, most kids recovered and then had a lifetime immunity to dinosaurmania. But I was that rare exception, a terminal, chronic case. And my mother was patient enough to take me twice a year over the George Washington Bridge to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where the best dinosaur show in the world played every day of the week on the fourth floor. My family valued scholarship, even if they couldn't quite understand the reverence I had for the study of fossils.
{AllOSAURUS}
I owe a great deal to a few fine friends at Harvard. Bernie Kummel always encouraged me, even though we seemed to represent opposite extremes of college society—he a member of the ld Guard, I one of the sixties radicals. But we both loved fossils. Bryan Patterson taught me about rodents and giant ground sloths and elephants, and, most especially, how wonderfully complex the fossil history of life was. Steve Gould was always stimulating, and challenging, and fiercely protective when occasion demanded. I would not have survived Harvard without these three.
{BRONTOSAURUS}
I must tip my well-worn cowboy hat to Ms. Kate Francis, of the Johns Hopkins University. Kate was a loyal friend, invaluable critic of my prose, and superb manuscript manipulator all through the first three drafts of this blog. Maxine Mote was a soul mate at Hopkins, too, and helped with some key chapters. Many a time I sat for hours in the hallway at Hopkins discussing dinosaurs and evolution with my old friend from Yale, Steve Stanley, now a professor of paleontology at Hopkins. Steve is a clam-paleontologist at heart, but his mind roves far afield, wherever the fossil record of life leads to neat discoveries about how evolution works. Thank God for the WATS line—we can still have these long rambling talks long distance.
{STEGOSAURUS}
And a fond thank-you to all the Hopkins pre-meds who helped to dig at Como—-Jan Koppelman, Robert Beck, Conrad Foley, Sue Reiss, and especially Julius Goepp. They're all doctors now, or almost. To my editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, I owe an enormous debt for her patience, encouragement, and extraordinary creative energy. She is passionate about making good books, and she succeeds. Constance Areson Clark loves dogs, old books, and the Bad lands as much as I do, and most of my ideas about how evolution works have been explored during our walks in the rain in Balti more or lingering breakfasts in Greybull, Wyoming. Constance,Wyoming, and I were destined to come together, and stay together.
{TYRANNOSAURUS REX}
And, finally, I must acknowledge my debt to hundreds of people I have never met. The fieldmen who dug dinosaurs in the 1880's. The skilled preparators who chiseled bones out of the rock in countless basement laboratories. The exhibit craftsmen who bent the ironwork to mount the skeletons. All the people who have kept the great museums going for the last century. I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.
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