David snook times bestselling author of dreamland which was a book about the science of sleep, the king and queen of malibu, about that eraa the way from previous smalltown to place for celebrities, had a great song in the 90s. And then like death at the golden gate about the bubonic plague and its arrival on the shores of america in the early 1900s. They came up the ridge 2019 in hardcover and paperback right at the start of 2020 an interesting time for that. Hes writing in your times, wall street journal of the Los Angeles Times among other publications. Hes a Senior Reporter at reuters and if its in montclair new jersey. Dave and i been talking, i love this book. I have young daughters, so when its offered to host it i thought, theyre going to think im so cool that im reading a book about the t. Rex because at that age there fascinated by it and why want to start our conversation is about a year ago this time i took my daughter scope i live here in nashville, we went up to new york for fall break and, of course, were going to include a visit to the American Museum of Natural History. During that trip, and we watched a night of the museum to prep for it, my daughters were really into dino dana on prime so were very excited, got up, gutter repair it was crowded as it always is. We got in Wearing Masks and is crowded and that is still little disorienting, to be in a crowd like that come to walk through the halls of this Incredible Museum and make our way to eventually to dinosaur hall instead of four of these incredible structures. And its disorienting i was overwhelmed by it. And its hard to read anything. My daughters were pulling me, its crowded and you feel like you should get going but certainly its hard to get the odd mama, thats a basic of magic onto the next thing. You, however, also took your family to median instead in front of the t rex and had a different experience which he talked about in the introduction that he thinks injured on the journey of this book and when if you talk about that. Personal thank you for coming. And they did. We went to the American Museum of Natural History that if the look in new york city area its also provide a passage come yet to take your kids of their to get some sleep taken to disneyland they will say why did you never do that . So we went to the museum and our kids were almost six and her daughter was therefore were Walking Around and it was the same expense, very overwhelming. Thats the thing, large museums, i think the problem with and sometimes is that so many amazing things. A gets lost in the crowd, you kind of see theres come for walking to the bet theres a snowman and then go and was a water fountain . Its hard to find a word you want to do. Our son can were standing in front of t. Rex and he became really quiet and first we thought hes scared, unit, the teeth are as long as his torso, this isnt a good thing. And he turns to senses, who found these bones . And usually the first time i realize there was a human story behind fossils. And i started going into more into it and so most like your polling at a threat and a sweater and yet i kept on going after was how did dinosaurs change was december such a monument is idea and such an alien concept that there were these gigantic creatures walking over earth 65 million years ago, and even the idea of the earth with 65 million years old was a radical idea. And i wanted to find the human stories to that and hopefully unlikely i did, which was barnum brown whose main character in this book. But one which i always like to describe it as even after doing this book, im not a paleontologist. I know more about paleontology that it did before but its still very low compared to a natural paleontologist or what i like in my comparison to in this book is that some people get into astronauts, space race and all that and they really get focused on spacecraft. How did the rockets i click it is to the men . Some people interested in astronauts. Im interested in astronauts get through with the people who open up the idea of dinosaurs to all of us and why, what push them to go to montana and south dakota . What pushed people to build these museums that we now enjoy everyday . You mention, i also took my daughter to the space and Rocket Center not long ago and it was an overwhelming experience. Like his is amazing, i have to move onto the next thing. You mention of barnum brown. The part of book is about him and his relationship with Henry Osborne who was the head of that department, the museum of natural and History Museum and went on to become the president. Hes one of a fascinating character and theres a book called the American Museum of Natural History and how it got that way that you can get in the gift shop up there and i picked it up and went back to look at it. After reading your book and barnum brown gets about three sentences. In the chapter about osborne and you do a good part of the book to him, and hes fascinating and i think there is maybe a book all about them, but hes somebody once you discover him, if youre discovered him as a kid you just want to be him, i think. I wonder if you could tell us about him, how he became who he is. And like you to start with the sins that i underlined that i love because its the inspiration how one people to see me, i think. Lets see. So this is about barnum brown. To be in his company meant whatever tied to the president on yourself compelled to explore not only the distance, not only beyond the distant horizon but whatever game after that, pushing us everything out until you reached a blank spot on the map. So he was one of those people whose enthusiasm was contagious. When were talking before hand, writing that sentence, im naturally an introvert and thats why im really able to kind of sit in front of the computer and fall into the past. But im blessed to be married to an extrovert who is very much has that type of personality that makes you realize whatever youre talking about, im interested. You could be talking about rocks, talking about snails, music, which if such enthusiasm for it that it makes me want to learn about, what is driving you to do that. Barnum brown really was, he was part of that generation where everything seemed to change. Almost seems like it was the beginning of the modern world in so many ways. His parents, they moved, a were homesteaders in kansas. He was the youngest of four children and he was following his dad alone on the farm and he started finding seashells. He started wondering why are we finding seashells over 600 or seven miles from the nearest ocean . That was a thing that got stuck on the idea fossils and paleontology. He was there at the beginning. There had been if you know a little about the history of paleontology there were bone wars which were two professors who they really popularized the concept of dinosaurs, lease and a scientific way. They are the ones went out, they named brontosaurus and all these other things, but nobody had really shown people what fossil are what does look like. Are the reasons it is competent and incumbent hard to build and armature, which holds a fossil. Thats one thing. Hopefully after you read this book if you ever do go to a museum and you see see a t. R something else, you realize how much of it is almost a a sculpture. Its not just this formerly living animal. You realize theyve done a good job of hiding everything thats kind of connecting it and almost killing of the sales because this waste several times, but somehow its animated and if his life like in a something i really appreciated just kind of at the museum in the presentation part of more than it ever did before and. That really comes across the work that goes into unearthing these fossils, but then shipping them back to a location and then they could take years for them to clean off the rest of the rock and the sediment to get them and then get them in some position to then mount, which is a whole other art form. Know vernon brown, he the pursuit of dinosaurs is really what got him out of kansas. You know he lived on a farm and he hated it. He he thought staying on the farm was a form of and he went to university of and he kind of talked on to these early paleontologist, paleontological digs and he very quickly demonstrated that he almost had this innate ability he wo he comes out with a fully realized triceratops or other monumental Museum Quality level displays and i think as you go through the book, hes very optimistic and he represents this idea of bringing time to the masses but he also has this tragic story so he has a kind of. It mirrors how science has worked in history. Hes optimistic but he starts realizing the downsides as well n you mentioned the bone wars, can you expand on what those were and how barnum finds himself in those wars i guess as a soldier and initially goes to work atfor Henry Osborne and osbornes role in those wars. That was how it was to find these fossils and get to them wa first and be the person to view it. Again, you talk about the pop culture, dinosaurs are with us and it seems like ive always been with us in our tvs and books but untold d1867, i might be off on a year, we dont know they exist in some ways. Exactly. Its understanding that it has come through a beginning, the person who came up with the term dinosaurs was widely hated. Widely hated by his peers and there was a lot of applet allegations of backstabbing. The bone wars were two professors, hope and marsh and they basically hated one another. It came from the fact that it had been contemporaneous to a certain extent and one of them was going to put up a paper saying he had found a twisted neck reptile, a dinosaur. What happened though was that he put the head where the tales should be and the other one didnt let him forget it so there was this animosity that builds and builds and they did do everything thbut they paid people to dynamite the other ones findings. There we go through the other ones digs in the middle of the night to scatter other bones to confuse them. There was one incident where they were both in wyoming both trying to get there eidigs or what they had dug up on a train going back east and they were fighting over who got to get out first but they and their teams ended up throwing rocks at each other. All of wyoming was a sandbox i joke so they really did have this animosity towards each other but something came out of that was that the west is full of these andinosaurs and we need to know more about them and those first days he went to south dakota, went to wyoming and montana but there were i think in the book i have an exact staff but its Something Like sheep outnumbered people 600 to 1. It really was the middle of nowhere. The reason he got out to montana in the first place is but he had a picture of a triceratops and somebody when they first found it thought it was a cow or something. Isthey didnt realize wait, this is something 30 or 40 million years old so they had a picture but they didnt know where it was so they said go to montana and find it. We go to japan to have one very small thing and while he was there thats how he end up ends up finding a t rex. So much of what we know about this mans history is based on happenstance and serendipity and earth is so much older than weve ever thought before and it starts changing and thatgerm of the idea is how will it change in the future. You can build a line pretty clearly from a t rex because you start to realize there is a narrative of history and these are the people who helped us realizethat. The book where its clear that this desire to just where going to segue into the role of a museum in this which is particularly interesting to me because initially i guess tthere are universities involved in the bone wars. We havent made it into adthere but it would be an interesting curiosity for visitors but at the time i guess they find the first bones do we think its 5000 years old . It was a literal biblical interpretation of the word. Sometimes to think they had done the math to the old testament. So eventually museums get involved in this picture which is interesting and initially i guess the very first museum is credited to Charles Peele in philadelphia, is that right . And it was considered a cabinet of curiosities, just interesting things for people to come look at. The idea you can be educated about things forthis can somehow have an impact on the way we see ourselves. But dinosaur bones start to become a big part of new zealands and what might bring people in and theres another section im going to ask you to ask because there is an intersection between museums but then also capitalism which is incredible at this time. Just this is the gilded age, people are making an enormous amount of money. I dont know what the percentages now but then you mentioned one percent of the population in 25 percent of the countrys wealth. So at some point the gentleman at the American Museum of Natural History realizes we can tap into these faults for the greater good but not initially but i do want to mention this section first that theres an area i guess its in philadelphia where they have thamazing early dinosaurs and gets crowded and then they start challenging or charging admission which excludes the poor from coming to visit so from there you get to the opening. And then there like hey, maybe we can some philanthropy. Not the section underlined but the section after which is about the net. You use the spoils of capitalism to bring culture to the masses is seen as a noble calling, like allowing one to act in ruthless selfinterest and for the public good. There is this quote that somebody wrote. Thinking that you millionaires of many markets what glory may yet be ours if you convert pork and porcelain, granite rice into priceless pottery and the rude oars of commerce and sculpted marble so there was this idea that settling families individuals had so much more money than ever before. They almost were outside of this idea of jeffersonian democracy. They were above it all and you thought okay, in some ways they needed to get it back, some kind of release out so people dont get too angry about this. One thing we can do is build this beautiful museum. And in new york, i didnt realize this until i worked on this book if you look in new york at Central New York the mets is on one side and American Museum of Natural History is on the other so its slipped, art near science and at the time its very easy to get people to go to art because its one of the most beautiful and its easy to get somebody to donate in their fields. I have all this money and somehow i have european masters. It was a very kind of going back to the other booki wrote about malibu. At the gold rush, that as soon as people started getting very wealthy in california thats when its something that had on rembrandts. They had to make themselves feel needed. The American Museum of Natural History had a different problem though is that if you have a monet or something beautiful its hard to getsomebody, easy to get somebody through the doors to see that. If you have abunch of rocks , its not as easy. Even if bold is a little bit easier but if you have here are some really rare iron or something for years a stump from a tree petrified 2000 years ago, its interesting but its not Something Like you pay for it for want to come in the door so they had this central crisis for a while, how do we get people interested in these items and how do we get people through the doors and thats where dinosaurs came from. So Albert Vic Moore who founds the Natural History museum realizes hey, we can tap in to these railroads tycoons and all this money. Hey, we can a lot of them people in the city we can educate them and the same thing is happening in other cities particularly pittsburgh with carnegie who as i said earlier seems genuine in his desire to take care of these bluecollar workers that are earning him all this money. That theres a place for their families to go so carnegie their curators and bone collectors have to answer to him and their pulling money from a lot of people so osborne who is running the Dinosaur Department or more a specifically whats their specific title . Paleontology, hes got a lot of people to answer with so bone wars reach a different level now. To really satisfy these owners. Which benefits the museums i guess the benefits the people going to visit those museums but not puts pressure on barnum brown. Barnum brown, they Start Building the museum and expand it and if youve been in new york its beautiful. Its several blocks. Its this fortress essentially of science and they Start Building it and it has all these empty rooms and barnum realizes hes the one whos supposed to fillthem. Hes driven by this anfear, he doesnt want to go back to the farm. Hes had this taste of a bigger wider world and is largest fear is that d hes going to not cut it essentially and have to go back and at the same time osborne ebis in charge of paleontology coming from a different edge. He is the incredibly wealthy. Hes privileged, he went to princeton and Everything Else and throughout his life hes always floated all his ambitions on family money. A nephew of . J. P. Morgan and his dad was head of a railroad which it was admittedly profitable back then and he wants to essentially seem like he is the most and in American Science and he thinks dinosaurs is the way to do that so hes pushing his explorers very hard to find something. He always feels like hes falling behind. Andrew carty at the carnegie museums, what is now known as the field museum, theyre already ahead of the game to so he feels like new york and his own life path might be diminished if they dont find something spectacular and its because of barnum brown, i can tell the story in the book but essentially barnum finds over half of the dinosaur specimens at the American Museum. He is really the one who brought dinosaurs into public conversations and make them accessible to regular people and now theres this idea of every time you take your case to the museum to see the dinosaurs youre really in barnumbrowns shadow. If it werent for him not of us would see that. He starts create these adventures in montana because the stakes are high and he goes to patagonia which then takes weeks i guess to get on a ship down there and theres no civilization as we think of it. Its a dangerous trip but some incredible things, that and that is a thrilling part of the book. Thats why i think barnum, dehes not Indiana Jones but could easily be because there are moments you think theres no way hes going to survive this but he does. Could you sum up whathappens in patagonia to him . He h goes down there with essentially a person he sees as an early hero. Developer bones, look for dinosaurs, they cant find a and his hero goes back and barnum is about to get on the ship and he says im not going to go back to. Hes again to go back emptyhanded so we days in paglia for another year himself potentially living off the land and he finds dozens of specimens that are now on display in American Museums but he also discovers within himself that he can do it. He has this new confidence of ive gone tothe wilderness and come back and i can make it on my own. And he also starts to learn more about the history of how we understand the world. Darwin went to patagonia as well. One thing i liked about the book was kind of learning the personalities of all these scientific icons that weve always thought of. You think of darwin and you think obviously yonatural selection and Everything Else. I didntrealize he got seasick. And he had this letter that he wrote back home of how much he hated the voyage and he hated it more with every swell of the ocean and he wrote back you who have never seen the deep green of the bottomless ocean can never know how much i hated. And i have a couple of pages about darwin just because he seems so fascinating that he got so interested in all those things. It was almost like he was a College Freshman and everything he saw was the most amazing thing ever. He writes a letter right now im redhot with spiders and he got into spiders for a while and then hes going through patagonia or theyre going somewhere in the South Pacific and hes watching dolphins at night and then hes taking up Everything Else and he sees these very small type of fish and he starts to wonder why god would spend so much time making something so inconsequential so beautiful and it seems like such a i dont know, for some reason like a very sublime thought and it made you think about how much we appreciate Natural Science and the earth and Everything Else in a different way. So you know, i started looking at dinosaur bones and fossils in a different way and you start to appreciate those in a way you never really thought of whether its religious or not just how beautiful this was. Since one of the questions i was going to ask you later was how doing this research, spending the years you did change you. I see all of your books living in that world, you just see the world differently. Since you mentioned that im curious. Certainly you see the th dinosaur displays differently but do you see the world a little differently . The earth differently . I think you kind of have to. Ive written four books. This is my fourth book and all of them have been very different. Im impressed by some writers , they write about ships or something and every book is about ships. I get bored too easily. If i learned a lot of ships thats all that id want to learn about ships. I couldnt withstand five books about ships so the first book i wrote about was acalled dreamworld and that was because i have a sleep disorder, i kicked and i started tonight talk and sing and all these other things and i started sleepwalking and i was sleepwalking and i walked into a wall and busted my knee and went to the doctor and i said im now mobile so what can i do and they said we dont really know anything about sleep. Thats the secret of science, we dont know anything about it so this was a book where i can find out all i could about it. The next book was king of malibu about the family that used to own all of malibu california and its this long complicated family saga but basically how they had all of malibu and how they lost it and kind of the tragic story behind that beautiful place. The other book was blackbeard at the golden gate which is about the outbreak of black played in the 19th century and a small group of doctors who essentially save the country from other did a devastating outbreak and how one doctor was a genius but he also rubbed everybody the wrong way and there was somebody else who graduated from med school and was an affable guy and it seemed like people could trust him and hes the one who saved all of us but you kind of go through these, i say all that because whati realized overall is you ,start to realize how much people matter. Its easy in some ways to kind of fall into that trap of the great people, great personalities in history and its only because of xyz people and its not necessarily that. Its more so how these people when theywere in these extraordinary situations , what their decisions, how did that still matter . Its almost if you throw a rock into a lake, those little rebels are still going and we dont necessarily see them. We cant necessarily feel them but we do. We still live that way. Malibu has celebrities in it and it is its this beautiful place because this woman a refused to develop it and she was a billionaire in our minds and was willing to die penniless because she used every last dollar to protect it. Her sons sued her and she was almost killed multiple times and its because of her we now think of malibu as celebrities. We did not have an outbreak of bubonic plague that millions like it did in india and japan because this person named rupert blue who wanted to, its not like his parents paid more attention to his war hero older brother so he wanted to do something that made his parents proud and we why do we know what dinosaurs are . Theres this kid barnum brown named after pt barnum because his parents took an older brother to the circus and came home and couldnt figure out what to name their new infants and the sixyearold came in and yelled lets name him barnum. This guy, we now know what the t rex is and we have Jurassic Park and all these order movies and billions of dollars in hollywood can be traced back to this one person who wanted to make a life for himself and he happened to find this. So id like to get to that part, 1902. Havel creek montana. Barnum finds the very first t rex and theres an older specimen. He finds that and it really things change for museums, for dinosaurs because there had been a lot before this, they had been displayed but Public Interest their kind into it but its not incredible. What happens when he discovers this . Public before had seen dinosaurs almost like a novelty. Every time they had a eddisplay lots of people came but they left just as quickly because it didnt seem that this was just to use an outdated term, this was a freak show. Ow but that t rex was different and snot just because it was more physically intimidating. When you first look when barnum brown looked down and saw these jaws and teeth it was like a time machine. He was the first person to go back 65 million years and see that but when you have all the dinosaurs before this t rex, all the well known dinosaurs were herbivores and its easy to see dinosaurs almost as this its boring. Its pretty, its big. Its kind of like if you remember the first Jurassic Park, the swelling music, beautiful part of the John Williams score but the t rex comes out and it changes everything because you realize the drama of life and predation, how do you survive . How do you protect your loved ones . That has been going on for millions of years before humans entered anand then you start to realize too that you have a creature this day, it has to eat a lot so therefore it has to be more dinosaurs overall and that means more life and if you have a creature this big attacking you or preying on you there must be some sort of defense mechanism so it starts to evoke a more complex relationship of life overall. It starts to, you realize earth had this daily drama and its been going on for a long time and you start to realize that the one thing i go back to why paleontology is still even after doing this book is so intimidating to me in so many ways is they have to make all these chains of logic. You have to know someone. Somewhat about anatomy to say this is whatever. Unlike bone and from that i can say or this is from that i can make this assumption of how big the animal was and from that caused this is how big this animal was they can have a function of what a and if i know what it eight and the ecosystem, whats the book like and the weather must have been bthis and it must have been this and this many animals overall and you have to say because of x, y, because of y, z and you can go this complex world all based on one assumption. I just cant do that, some people can and ta paleontologist im not but the t rex was really what made make people realize theres somuch more here , not just these giant creatures with longnecks. If you have a question and i hope you do, theres a microphone set up over here because i didnt tell you we were live on cspan, where live on cspan so we have to capture audio so please do if you have a question for david, but to that microphone. We got about 15 minutes. So the public, the imagination that captures the publics imagination now theres violence and fighting with the dinosaurs and theres a battle for survival which maybe speaks to some american egos i guess about the struggle to survive but then theres something that vicious dies off and that also says then we can also. Everything we can do, we can also die off so i think maybe the public realizes what happened so that question starts. Exactly, that was the unspoken question. You see a t rex mounted in front of you realize if it was a battle i would quickly lose. How am i still alive and this thing is not . That became a big question. And at the time that question was filled in by a lot of prejudice and racism. It has to be this or that and thats one thing before i started this book i didnt think there could be a connection between dinosaurs and racism. It almost seems like o potpourri to say these two things are connected but one of his legacies was that he was this person who thought that what he called nordic culture was the evening. If you think of all of creation as the story essentially, then white anglosaxon person is at the top of that. So its a very easy scoreboard for him in a lotof ways. Humans have the capacity to care for their young, have intelligence, theyre just more loving in general and there alive and ordinosaurs are not so there must be a reason. Paleontologists now realize a lot of that is not true in terms of just the dinosaur part of it. Thats a t rex was basically intelligent, they did care for their young. So many of these assumptions from 100 years ago now cannot be true. If you dont want to go up you can raise your hand and ill repeat your question if thats helpful. [inaudible]. This backlash against the discovery. The question is about a religious backlash to the idea that the earth was older than 5000 years because you see that even today. Thats very prominent, out what point does the backlash happen from a religious perspective . It happens more once dinosaurs were part of the culture, once they were very popular and at the beginning it was almost a sense of amazement by everybody. And it was the idea of dinosaurs must have died out in the great flood or something. Or for some reason there wasnt a boat hole enough to hold it or something and that was more a sense of curiosity and it almost seemed like they didnt know what to make of them. Just over generations the search would become a part of , becomes part of the bedrock system this is what the world looks like and this is where you have a backlash and the same way you have backlash against a lot of other things. As the world its almost like in the book you talk about its almost like you have this that tells you the story of everything and suddenly you have to add these chapters to it and wait a minute, these later chapters no longer square with the earlier chapters and you have a cognitive dissonance so it took a while for that to even be established. Once dinosaurs get the science of dinosaurs are taught in schools, it comes back, thats when you have people pushing back against it. One of the things i find interesting as the museum person is that theres this tendency to see history as set or what has been decided as having happened. But then theres new technology and new research. Which starts to shift the way we see those things so now were seeing dinosaurs at one point the t rex is positioned on what they call the godzilla pose. With detail dragging and then until 1990 so how we see the dinosaur in cartoons now is not that old, 30 years. In terms of that cessation but really in that. Yes. Weve got unlike right there if you can use it. Dating back these kinds of things, carbon dating but i wonder how barnum saw all these things out in the wild and knew they were as old as they were w . I assume there was not carbon dating technology. What they did more so was look at the layers. The strategy strata of the impediments so they realize theres something called the katie boundary which they had v a sense of , barnum wanted people to recognize this. This boundary is basically the layer of sediment that happened when the giant asteroid hit. Its covered the entire world with certain types of sediment and you basically see theres earth, theres levels below and fossils about it but for that layer theres nothing so basically they didnt have a good sense of exactly the 65 million or 70 million or 80 million. Really it was just a guess and it was based on what else are we finding near its that makes me realize this is the same era. Thats something i was a little surprised by going to the book and they always they found a dinosaur, they found a t rex and thats the monumental thing that we found a t rex but theres also a turtle there too. But its that same idea of th this all of life was happening at the same time and the process is of fossilization or an animal to become fossilized its, you have to have the exact right conditions. A lot of it was because an animal died and got swept away and it was covered very quickly so oxidation didnt happen quickly and that was why youmight have a turtle next to a t rex. And that just means one other thing before i forget. Barnum brown founded the first known t rex and then he found the next two known as well so he found three. Theres only been about 50 t rex is ever found. Theres i think in the book too, t rexs lips were about 10 or 15 million years overall. And scientists now estimate theres Something Like 2 million or something lived in a lifespan, t rex total walked on the earth. Of those theres Something Like only 2000 could have been fossilized and barnum brown, it makes you realize how incredible it was that he found not only one but three and if you do go to the muAmerican Museum the t rex you see there is not the first one found. It was actually the best parts of number two and three because osborne wanted to put on a show so he really wanted evto find the best display so one of these the first t rexs founder in pittsburgh now. They sold it for your of new york getting bombed. They thought it might be safer during world war ii in carnegie. Thats one of the things too, in that ripple of history you realize why is the t rex in pittsburgh . Its because they were scared there were going to be german bombs dropped on new york city and they felt like they could replace lots of things, they couldnt replace this with the same time that matt was pretty much empty in all ofit to the biltmore. And they sent the t rex to pittsburgh. Thats fascinating. One of the things i want to talk about for a few minutes is this lingering issue with the culture. So you got the Natural History museum on one side of central park. The net, art and Natural History are separate although you have benefactors seeing the benefits of now olbut no ones collecting dinosaur bones for their personal collections as they might be with art. Although that kind of changes in the late 80s, 1987. When the first private auction at sothebys for a t rex for an entire t rex and then it happens again in 2020. And in millions of dollars. So what was that like . Is impossible for a museum to spend 5 million, right . It becomes a much different story. The t rexbecause it become so popular is transcended , is now part of culture so their wars these options they have these listings they said that he rex stand up very nicely against a picasso or something else. In the same exelon now. And they thought it was going to go for 10 million or something and it went for31. 4 million. And so at the time they didnt knknow the person who the purchaser was. Now they know that it was dubai, because they were se going to create a new Natural History museum there. Nobody thought it was going to go as high because it also had the homore you learn about dinosaurs more complicated and confusing in some ways. They sold it but did not did not include intellectual property and you think of why would a dinosaur and it, but you cant mix make tshirts or toys, you cant make anything else and thats all how museums recuperate a lot of the money. So its become this issue now its very hard to have a sense of if youre a museum, Natural History museum if you have a t rex or not it really is a scoreboard in a lot of ways, if youre in the big leagues you have a t rex, if youre not in your just a regional museum. So when dthere was a t rex nicknamed stan that went for option in 2000, that was the one at the History Museum. They came up with a lot of money from the help of mcdonalds to buy it but the north rtcarolina museum of Natural History, they were a big better to get to the bigger leagues. Somebody else was involved. Disney, they were part of it to. The issue now is t rex especially of all dinosaur fossils theres money in it but a t rex especially theres tons of money. In the book i talk about somebody found a juvenile t rex and they wanted to sell to a billionaire but didnt knowhow to get their attention so they put it on ebay. And ebay told them put it down and they didnt understand why. That i own this and this is my property so it becomes s this question of t rex or any other fossil is a commodity, is it science . What do you have to . Based on law if its on your land is your private property. Weve got just two minutes. I really recommend this fascinating book. Youll fall in love with barnum brown. There is tragedy in his life to but its wonderful. We got less than two minutes now. What has pete your curiosity . Im done with dinosaurs you said. Im about to start working on the next one. I dont want to give away too much but it has to do with an around the world race. And the same era, 1924. We mentioned a lot of your books focus on this turnofthecentury period. Which is fascinating, people accomplished quite a bit and my wife and i talk tabout how did the date they do that many things . They didnt have tv, they didnt have cell phones, they were distracted but they could go where there to curiosity went. Did you travel around the world to do research . Thatwould be nice. Its post covid, that would be nice. Im hopefully they will. Imgoing to pitch that. You can buy books at the parnassus tent of the war memorial plaza. And then youll be signing books, right next to that the signing will take a walk up there. I guess were just winding down now so thank you so much for joining us. [applause] anytime online at booktv. Org. Television for serious readers. Weekends are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories and on sunday book tv brings you the latest and nonfiction books and authors. Funding comes from these Television Companies and more including wow. The world has changed and today a fast reliable Internet Connection is