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House of lost worlds : dinosaurs, dynasties, and the story of life on earth

by Richard Conniff

This history of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History chronicles 150 years of scientific discovery, from dinosaur excavations to the study of ancient civilizations. It profiles the explorers and researchers who shaped the museum's collections and global impact.

Accession 9780300211634 ISBN 9780300211634 Publisher Yale University Press

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spine_text: RICHARD CONNIFF HOUSE of LOST WORLDS Yale

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Topics and Themes

1. **The History & Purpose of Natural History Museums**
The book is fundamentally a 150-year institutional biography of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, exploring how it was founded, how it struggled to find a home, and how it shaped — and was shaped by — the scientific ideas of its era. It asks what museums are *for* and what it means to collect and display the natural world.

Connect to books about: museum history, the history of collecting, cultural institutions, public science education.

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2. **Paleontology & the Discovery of Deep Time**
A central thread is the excavation and interpretation of fossils — from Brontosaurus and Triceratops to trilobites and cycads — and what those finds revealed about the vast, pre-human history of life on Earth. The book explores how paleontology transformed humanity's sense of time and its place in nature.

Connect to books about: paleontology, evolutionary biology, the fossil record, deep time, geology.

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3. **Scientific Rivalry, Ego & the "Bone Wars"**
The ferocious competition between O. C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope — the notorious "Bone Wars" — runs through the book as a study in how personal ambition, jealousy, and rivalry can simultaneously drive and distort scientific progress.

Connect to books about: the sociology of science, scientific fraud and ethics, competitive discovery, the history of American science.

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4. **Wealth, Philanthropy & the Patronage of Knowledge**
The Peabody Museum was born from the fortune of banker George Peabody, and dynastic maneuvering among wealthy families helped bring it to life. The book examines how private wealth has shaped public scientific institutions, and what strings — visible or invisible — come attached.

Connect to books about: philanthropy, Gilded Age America, the history of universities, science funding, elite patronage.

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5. **Scientific Exploration & the "Heroic" Age of Discovery**
The book is peopled with bold explorers heading into unmapped Western badlands, rediscovering Machu Picchu, trekking through unfamiliar ecosystems, and wrestling ancient bones from the earth. It romanticizes — but also interrogates — the era when scientific fieldwork looked like adventure.

Connect to books about: exploration, natural history expeditions, the American West, Victorian-era science travel.

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6. **Evolution, Scientific Education & the Culture Wars**
The book traces how the Peabody's scientists championed evolutionary theory — including the Scopes trial testimony of one museum director — and how science education became a contested space in American public life.

Connect to books about: the history of evolutionary thought, the Scopes trial, science and religion, science communication and public understanding.

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7. **Ecology, Conservation & the Human Relationship with Nature**
The book moves from dinosaur hunters to early ecologists, from fossil collectors to conservationists, tracing a deepening scientific and moral reckoning with the natural world. Figures like George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society, connect natural history collecting to the birth of the conservation movement.

Connect to books about: the history of environmentalism, ecology, conservation biology, human-nature relations.

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8. **Institutional Memory, Collections & the Problem of Provenance**
The Peabody's millions of collected objects — most never on public display, stored in basements and off-site facilities — raise questions about what it means to "own" the natural and cultural past. The book also honestly examines the museum's debacles alongside its triumphs, gesturing toward fraught questions of colonial collecting and cultural repatriation.

Connect to books about: archival science, provenance and repatriation, colonial collecting, the ethics of natural history collections.

House of lost worlds : dinosaurs, dynasties, and the story of life on earth

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