Dinosaur Mountain: Digging into the Jurassic Age

Earl Douglass was a teenager when he first heard about the Bone Wars—the frenzied race between paleontologists to unearth and classify dinosaur fossils—and he remained fascinated with these prehistoric giants for the rest of his life. As a geologist and botanist working at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Douglass had a hunch that the vast untouched rock strata in northeastern Utah just may have been a haven for Jurassic fossil beds. In 1908, he set out by mule team to the Uinta Basin to dig and discover. Find me “something big,” Andrew Carnegie instructed.

Little did Carnegie know exactly how well Douglass would heed those words. Sixteen years and 350 tons of fossils later, Earl Douglass emerged as one of the most prolific and successful dinosaur hunters of his time.

Using entries directly from Douglass’s diary along with her own evocative storytelling and artwork, acclaimed author and illustrator Deborah Kogan Ray paints the life of this adventurous bone hunter in memorable detail.