From ambitious paleontological research expeditions and spectacularly mounted museum exhibitions to blockbuster books and films such as The Lost World and Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have been the subject of intense scientific and popular interest since the discovery of the Megalosaurus fossils two centuries ago. In Articulating Dinosaurs, acclaimed author and anthropologist Brian Noble explores how dinosaurs and their natural worlds are recreated today through the complex exchanges of geologists, paleobiologists, museum curators, science fiction writers, filmmakers, and popular media with their diverse audiences.

Divided into two sections, Articulating Dinosaurs focuses on the scientific and cultural reconstruction of the two most iconic dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus rex and Maiasaura. Noble devotes the first part of his book to early twentieth-century fantasies of the “Lost World of the Mesozoic” – including cinematic dinosaur-monster animations – which still inform the popular imagination and the imagination of paleontologists today. The second half of the book is an ethnographic case study of the Royal Ontario Museum’s massively popular exhibit of the Maiasuara dinosaur and the Working Lab, which allowed the public to watch the real-time preparation of a fossil skeleton obtained from Montana.

A fascinating look at the political and social implications of human interactions with these prehistoric “objects” and their scientific and symbolic worlds, Articulating Dinosaurs will appeal to a wide audience of specialists as well as the general reader.