Description:

World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster's universe changedforever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer . . . and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus. For Leyster and a select group of scientific colleagues an impossible fantasy has come true: the ability to study dinosaurs up close, in their own era and milieu. But tampering with time and paradox can have disastrous effects on the future and the past alike, breeding a violent new strain of fundamentalist terror -- and, worse still, encouraging brilliant rebels like Dr. Gertrude Salley to toy with the working mechanisms of natural law, no matter what the consequences. And when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever walked the Earth, the consequences may be too horrifying to imagine . . .

Amazon.com Review

Paleontologist Richard Leyster is studying the dinosaur-fossil discovery of a lifetime when a stranger comes into his office with an ice cooler and an offer: a mysterious and dangerous job that pays no better than Leyster's beloved current position at the Smithsonian. He rejects the offer and the stranger departs, leaving the cooler. Leyster opens the cooler and finds the head of a just-slain stegosaur. It really is an offer he can't refuse: a job that will allow him to study living dinosaurs. But the stranger has disappeared, and Leyster has no idea where to find him.

Expanded from his Hugo Award-winning story "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth is a time-travel novel as exciting as Jurassic Park and far more intelligent. In addition to the Hugo, Michael Swanwick has won the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His previous books include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, and Griffin's Egg, and his collections include Gravity's Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, and Moon Dogs, among others. --Cynthia Ward

From Booklist

Bones of the Earth is a worthy successor to Swanwick's previous novel, Jack Faust (1997), for it, too, is a strange and thrilling take on great legends and cultural obsessions. In Bones, that obsession is the thoroughly modern fascination with paleontology and, in particular, dinosaurs. Paleontologist Richard Leyster is working on what should be the find of a lifetime and the making of a career. Then a stranger named Griffin makes him an offer by dropping into his office one day with a promise of great things--and the head of a triceratops, freshly killed. That piques Richard's interest, and he is on tenterhooks until Griffin comes back, and he accepts his mysterious visitor's requirements of secrecy. The subsequent action spans geologic time, not just centuries but millennia, and although Griffin understandably does everything he can to prevent paradoxes, as always, the unexpected happens, even when the future is firmly known. Regina Schroeder
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