Book Review – Douglas Preston’s “Tyrannosaur Canyon”
Today I finished reading Douglas Preston’s dinosaur-themed novel, Tyrannosaur Canyon.
The last time I read a dinosaur book was Michael Crichton’s masterpiece, Jurassic Park. That is one of my favorite books of all time, and I know that when it comes to that subject material, it’s going to be hard to top Crichton’s work.
Instead of bringing dinosaurs back to life or creating a unique theme park on a remote island, Preston’s Tyrannosaur Canyon goes into the world of paleontology and the world of fossils. Specifically, the world of black market fossil excavations and trading.
I’ll be honest here and say that some parts of the story and characters were a bit simplistic, but other parts, especially in the basement laboratory and everything dealing with the fossils themselves, were quite interesting.
Tyrannosaur Canyon starts out with an innocent bystander (Tom Broadbent) finding a mortally wounded man out in a remote canyon area in New Mexico. The wounded man was ambushed and shot a few times, but he survived long enough to pass along his notebook and last words to the innocent bystander. The bystander is able to escape with the notebook before the unknown assassin is able to reach the now-killed man and claim his prize.
It turns out that the murdered man had stumbled upon a significant paleontological find, a find that would change the world’s knowledge on dinosaurs, and his talk amongst fellow dinosaur hunters had attracted the wrong kind of attention. A professor at the Museum of Natural History wants his find and hires an ex-con to steal the notebook through any means necessary.
So now that the assassin’s plan has been thwarted, the race is on for him to track Broadbent and acquire the notebook with its information about the fossil’s secret location. The ex-con ultimately kidnaps Broadbent’s wife, and it isn’t long before Broadbent and his wife are on the run through the desert with a killer hot on their trail.
But this is just part of what takes place in Tyrannosaur Canyon.
Throw in a lab worker at the Museum of Natural History who makes a revolutionary discovery; a former CIA worker who, in the process of becoming a monk, helps decipher the code in the notebook and find the dinosaur fossil; and a secret government agency that tries to eliminate everybody who has any knowledge of the special fossil.
As a murder / thriller novel, Tyrannosaur Canyon is okay at best. The story moves at a quick pace and it won’t take long to read the entire book. The characters and dialogue is a bit simplistic at times, and some of the action scenes are a bit over-the-top
Fortunately, everything involving paleontology and the dinosaur fossils is where this story shines. This book was published back in 2005, so the equipment and theories don’t have that “dated” feeling like in other novels.
Oh, and there is a little bit of science fiction thrown into the book too. Just when you have it all figured out, on the last page or so one of the characters suggests a rather interesting theory. Perhaps, just perhaps, the mass extinction of dinosaurs wasn’t as “natural” of a disaster as once believed.
Tyrannosaur Canyon is an easy but fun read, especially if you have an interest in dinosaurs and paleontology. Don’t expect the dinosaurs to walk around and eat people, though. They stay dead and fossilized in this book. But everything involving the fossils and black market trading of dinosaur fossils is quite an interesting read itself.
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