Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Book Review: "The Bone Museum", by Wayne Grady
The subtitle of this book -- "Travels in the Lost Worlds of Dinosaurs and Birds" -- gives an idea as to what the book is really about. Though while I was looking forward to a book that looked closely at the debate as to whether birds arose from dinosaurs, I learned more about the writer, Wayne Grady. He is a writer and was once science editor for the late, lamented Equinox, and with regard dinos, can best be described as a serious amateur paleontologist.

On the whole, I found the book a disappointment leavened only by the fact that it is well-written. I remember being about a hundred pages into the book, as the writer talks about heading down to a dino dig in Patagonia, that I still hadn't read anything concrete on either dinos, birds or the dino/bird debate. I had met a number of interesting characters who are lead paleontologists researching the debate, but I learned about as much about Grady's reading habits, inexperience with Spanish and his reminiscences. It's all well-written -- which is what kept me from dropping the book in disgust -- but while I think the book tries to be a travelogue that weaves in a history of dinos and birds, it ends up being much more a book about Mr. Grady. The result is that no one subject -- other than Mr. Grady -- gets covered very well.

There are also some odd jumps in the book. One moment we're at a Patagonian dig, seeing the author try to dig out some dino bones, and the next moment we are back in Ontario, regaled for much of a chapter about how the author's 80's VW minivan breaks down outside Wawa. What happened to the rest of the dig in Patagonia? Why would I be interested in hearing about his car breaking down in Wawa? As it turns out he's on his way to a dig site in the Badlands of Alberta, and he has some interesting birding moments along the way, but an editor could have easily excised much of this in order to retain some focus.

Grady does plenty of digressing, and when it is on topic (and occasionally when it is off-topic) his musings are fascinating, such as his thoughts on the intelligence of birds, the primitive, dino-like characteristics that live on in some birds, and current conservation efforts. And he does a good job in conjuring the personalities he meets, the scenarios in which the dino bones he is digging came to be there (floods seem to be popular) and what it's like to work on a dino dig. He's a good writer, and that's why I finished off the book.

The author sounds like an interesting character, and maybe the next time I'm in Kingston (where he lives) I'll look him up -- though he might not want to meet me if he hears of this review. ;-) But in the end I learned a lot more about the author than the bird/dino debate.