While the synopsis and title promise a micro history of how the T. rex led to the fake and success of a New York museum, the truth is this is an over detailed biography of the two men behind that success.
I noticed multiple times that I had no idea what was happening because I’d zoned out entirely, the writing getting into almost microscopic levels of detail about totally irrelevant facts and stories.
There’s university politics, details of how to unearth a fossil, the horror of a fire in a museum with live exhibits- just extreme levels of background that are totally unnecessary if you’re waiting for a story about the discovery of T. rex. I still had no idea who half the people mentioned in the book were at the 45% mark. Why was this professor mentioned? Who did he teach? I don’t know! But I know women weren’t accepted into the university. Because the author felt that detail important.
But if you realize that this is not in fact what was promised on the label, and continue reading you get a biography of the two men in question. And every single minute detail of their lives and all of the people who had an effect on them. Every single event that could be tied to the museum they eventually build together.
Supremely disappointing.

Thanks to Netgalley and Highbridge Audio for the audio ARC of this!

A look into the cultural change that finding dinosaur bones and subsequent digs brought about, as well as the personal lives and feuds of paleontologists, full of all kinds of facts, I definitely learned new things from listening to this, including probably embarrassingly just realizing that museums buy fossils/pay for digs to curate their collections. The history was mostly interesting, though it got a little slow in some points. The narrator was decent and I have no real complaints about the audio version. If you are as fascinated by dinosaurs as I am, I think this is one worth picking up.

I enjoyed this book. Honestly, I've never really thought about where dinosaur bones came from or how they were collected. We can go to a museum and see the effects of decades of blood, sweat, and toil without ever understanding the people behind all that hard work. This book introduced us to those people and told their stories, many who I had heard of before but didn't realize their contribution to this enterprise.

I felt the author did a great job with the research and was able to convey a lot of information to us in a n easy to read manner. It was informative without reading like a textbook.

I listened to the audiobook. The narrator was charming and engaging.

I am sort of struggling in reviewing this because I don't think it's a bad book, but I don't think I went in with the correct expectations.

Despite the title, this is not really a T. rex book. It is more a book about Henry Fairfield Osborn and Barnum Brown and their struggle to make and keep the American Museum of Natural History in New York City relevant, which led to T. rex being a big part of their lives. While I think this is an interesting endeavor, I found Lukas Rieppel's Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle a more engaging version of a similar undertaking.

I did appreciate the end commentary about the nature of wealth in the present day making science less accessible, as seen in the contrast of the sales of SUE and Stan, both T. rex fossils that were sold at auction - Sue in 1997 to Chicago's Field Museum and Stan in 2020 to an undisclosed private collection.

While the topic of this book - the discovery of T-Rex absolutely fascinates me, I couldn't get past the narrator. Even speeding the audio up to 2 times the normal speed did nothing to to speed up the excruciatingly slow delivery. The overprounciation of every word set my teeth on edge, and I didn't last 15 minutes before I had to give up