Assembling the Dinosaur, Lukas Rieppel
Assembling the Dinosaur, Lukas Rieppel
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Assembling the Dinosaur

Author: Lukas Rieppel

Narrator: Pete Cross

Unabridged: 9 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/10/2019

Categories: Nonfiction, Nature, Fossils


Synopsis

Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the worlds largest industrial economy, and creatures like tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus, and triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films. Assembling the Dinosaur follows dinosaur fossils from the field to the museum and into the commercial culture of North Americas Gilded Age. Business tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made common cause with vertebrate paleontologists to capitalize on the widespread appeal of dinosaurs, using them to project American exceptionalism back into prehistory. Learning from the show-stopping techniques of P. T. Barnum, museums exhibited dinosaurs to attract, entertain, and educate the public. By assembling the skeletons of dinosaurs into eye-catching displays, wealthy industrialists sought to cement their own reputations as generous benefactors of science, showing that modern capitalism could produce public goods in addition to profits. Behind the scenes, museums adopted corporate management practices to control the movement of dinosaur bones, restricting their circulation to influence their meaning and value in popular culture.

About Lukas Rieppel

Lukas Rieppel is the David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Brown University. He has held fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University, the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern University, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Felicia

Truly brilliant! A must-read for anyone interested in pondering the variety of ways in which history is reconstructed, not just via dinosaur fossils (or, in some spectacular assemblages, pseud0-fossils) but via any artifact of one's own choosing. My one caveat is the absence of a true Bibliography. (......more

Goodreads review by Terry

A neat look at the results of finding dinosaur fossils made on the world and the way the world affected the search for more.......more