A Fossil-Hunter's Notebook: My Life with Dinosaurs and Other Friends

Here is an autobiography of immense interest. It enables the reader to take an absorbing journey with a young scientist from Missouri that eventually spans all the continents of the world, and extends backward four hundred million years or so, to a time before dinosaurs and mammoths roamed the earth and the continents were not yet adrift. Edwin H. Colbert was for forty years a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, becoming Chairman of its Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. The discovery of the fossil reptile Lystrosaurus by his team in Antarctica a decade ago stirred the scientific world. It offered corroborative evidence for the theory of continental drift and was hailed as "one of the truly great fossil finds of all time."Endlessly fascinating is this juxtaposition of the intimate, the immediate, the day-to-day work and progress, and, sometimes, the drudgery of a fossil-hunter, and the vast scope of the implications of his work. We share in the illuminating drama of a mind that much of the time lives back in the remote past hundreds of millions of years ago and perceives in the outcroppings of rock and the small sections of fossilized bone, a vivid panorama of that distant era.In his life story Dr. Colbert tells us of his boyhood in Missouri, the little "museum" he arranged as a small boy in one corner of his father's study, and his early expeditions to the fossil quarries and badlands of the American West. He tells the eventful story of his journeys and fossil diggings in Africa, India, the Middle East, South America, Australia, and Antarctica, of preserving and exhibiting dinosaur and other fossils in the great museums, and of his scientific friendships. Dr. Colbert has published several books about paleontologists and their quarry, but none is more fascinating that this quietly unassuming, yet endlessly dramatic story of his own richly rewarding life.