Paul Brinkman provides a flood of new data on American fossil collecting in a book that reads more like an Old West novel than a historical monograph. The thorough reconstruction of turn-of-the-twentieth-century dinosaur digs, based mostly on correspondence and museum archives, traces the transit of fossils from outcrops of bone-bearing Jurassic strata in the western United States to major museums, namely the well-established American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the up-and-coming Field Columbian Museum and the Carnegie Museum. Brinkman documents the prospecting, discovery, excavation, packing and shipping of dinosaur fossils alongside fieldworkers’ arduous camp lifestyles and variable professional relationships with their museum-curator bosses. While his charting of curator–collector conflicts and inter-museum competition makes for an engrossing read, Brinkman's impressively researched story includes little in-depth historical analysis and few connections to the ‘big picture’ of early twentieth-century science or social history.

The first Jurassic dinosaur rush, of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was defined by the infamously bitter rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, as they raced to find and name new species. That fierce competition in many ways marked the birth of American palaeontology, with the creation of large fossil collections; a generation of workers trained by either Cope or Marsh to find, dig, prepare and mount fossils; and a complicated mess of dinosaur taxonomy with contested species names and lineages. These legacies shaped the ‘second’ rush, as museums and universities raced each other again for new fossil specimens. This second round of fieldwork also largely carried on the previous generation's practices, because almost all of Brinkman's historical actors were trained by Cope, Marsh or one of their workers. However, the competition that Brinkman emphasizes as more and more fossil collectors headed west in the early twentieth century was significantly different from that of their first-rush predecessors. The scientific glory that Cope and Marsh had pursued was still a sought-after goal, but museums now focused more on impressing the public than on impressing other scientists. Attracting visitors was a crucial part of museums’ survival, especially for newer ones like the Field Columbian Museum and the Carnegie Museum. Even the AMNH more often searched for mountable specimens than for scientifically interesting but less impressive fossils. Museum administrators thought that the best way to get people through the doors was to promise them a glimpse of the biggest dinosaurs – Jurassic sauropods.

Brinkman offers a valuable contribution to the history of palaeontology in his meticulous study of these major museums’ efforts to find the biggest and most complete skeletons. He recounts, in almost day-to-day detail, how curators fought for fieldwork funding, hired fieldworkers and corresponded with them to keep close tabs on potential finds and excavation progress. Brinkman describes how the fieldworkers arranged transport and equipment, set up camp and preserved professional hierarchy while promoting congenial camp relations (or tried to, in some cases). These little-known stories interlink with the more familiar fieldwork tales of fabulous finds and crushing disappointment. Brinkman also highlights the physical work of collecting, by describing the number of vertical feet of rock that lay on top of a fossil outcrop, the days of digging with pick and shovel just to reach the fossil-bearing strata in the hope of finding bones there, and the narrow twenty-foot shaft that the Field Columbian Museum's 1901 field party tunnelled into a cliff to reach the end of a sauropod's tail.

If the collectors were lucky enough to find fossils, and if those fossils were well preserved enough to collect, and if they were associated as a relatively complete individual, then the collectors would start to dig them out. They put a layer of plaster and burlap cloth around each bone or rock-embedded block of bones, as a ‘jacket’ to protect the fossils on the voyage east (an innovation by AMNH fieldworkers in 1897 that was quickly imitated by other parties). Brinkman lists the number of rail boxcars that each field party filled with jacketed fossils at the end of every field season, highlighting the weight, fragility, size, and number of sauropod fossils that were transported from their remote strata to the closest railroad town and then shipped by rail to the museum that had funded their excavation.

These detailed accounts bring out fieldwork as a dirty, sweaty, and absolutely crucial aspect of palaeontology. Brinkman gives names, histories and personalities to the often unrecognized collectors whose skilful fossil-spotting and expert excavation yielded fossils that quickly became the joys of palaeontologists and museum visitors, as they continue to be today. However, the historical significance of some details – such as every fieldworker's train route west for all three museums over the course of four years – is questionable, and Brinkman's analytical arc is often lost during the chapters of fieldwork description.

Brinkman condenses the arguably most interesting part of the story into his last chapter. The conversion of arduously collected fossils into mounted dinosaurs of national acclaim is a strikingly complicated and artistic process. These literally huge accomplishments inspired new technologies, including pneumatic hammers to remove rock from fossils and specially fitted steel brackets to support the delicate fossils as mounted skeletons. These techniques continue to have a huge impact on the feasibility and efficiency of fossil research and mounting. They deserve more attention in Brinkman's story, as does the public's reception of the mounts. Another little-addressed legacy is palaeontologists’ revision of Cope and Marsh's messy dinosaur lineages based on studies of the newly collected sauropod specimens.

Was the ‘rush’ a success? Did dinosaurs bring crowds to major museums? The obvious answer is ‘yes’, because these museums’ most famous mounts continue to be these early twentieth-century finds. For example, casts of the Carnegie Museum's Diplodocus carnegii specimen were given as gifts to several countries and mounted in museums worldwide, beginning with the Natural History Museum in London. These highly visible constructions are the main legacy of the second Jurassic dinosaur rush, in addition to major advances in collecting, preparing and mounting huge fossil specimens.