Corythosaurus

About 78 million years ago this duck-billed dinosaur lived on the Red Deer River in Canada, eating plants and emitting a booming alarm call from its high crested head. It died there too - possibly drowned, for its rigid skeletonic corset stopped it from swimming - and there it lay until in 1914 its fossil skeleton was discovered by Barnum Brown who gradually excavated it and took it by mule train to the American Museum of Natural History where it was equally gradually reassembled so we can see it now. So nearly complete was it that many discoveries about Corythosaurus' way of life could be made. This book brings two things to life - Corythosaurus itself and, more importantly to my mind and certainly much rarer in this sort of book, the expedition that produced the fossils. Wonderful contemporary photographs show Barnum Brown and his colleagues at work, illustrating the scale of the exercise and its difficulties. Their base camp was a flat bottomed boat on the river on which was pitched their mess tent - complete with stovepipe through the roof. In choosing to focus thus individually upon one dinosaur species and one particular episode of palaeontology, William Lindsay has provided a characterful addition to the range of dinosaur books - already much enlivened by his Dinosaur Atlas.