TIME TRAVELER

Entertaining snapshots of the author’s worldwide journeys in search of bones, rocks, and all that other stuff of the dinosaur business.

Growing up within shouting distance of Los Angeles’s La Brea tar pits, Novacek (Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, 1996), now curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, got bitten early by the dinosaur bug. In the late ’60s, rather than follow the other members of his rock band to Woodstock, he signed on to a fossil-finding expedition with UCLA zoologist Peter Vaughn, who had jumped from the Permian to the Pennsylvanian eras (a hop of more than a hundred million years) to track down some “really neat” amphibians. This exercise in “time tripping” was all it took to hook Novacek, who himself had found a few really neat fossils on family vacations in Wisconsin and the Grand Canyon. Subsequently employed by various colleges and then the AMNH, he has spent the last four decades wandering in and out of such places as Yemen, Tierra del Fuego, and the Gobi Desert, hunting for the sometimes big, sometimes scary life forms of the distant past. Armchair travelers will enjoy Novacek’s account of such venues, while would-be paleontologists will benefit from his picture of how fieldwork is conducted, breezily unfolded across a span of many anecdotes about expedition-mounting in unpredictable circumstances amid perils that range from runaway trucks on Mexican cliff faces to rabid Arabian dogs and dancing Chilean belles. For Novacek, though, any difficulties have been offset by his profession’s payoffs, which include both advancing science and allowing him “to see extraordinary places and people in a world that, even during my few decades of field exploration, has become less exotic and more intimately entwined.”

A real pleasure for dinosaur buffs.