Barnum in Columbus

I'm very pleased to learn that Barnum's Bones was selected as a Top 20 Children's Book of 2012 by the Columbus Dispatch.  You can view the entire list here.  It's wonderful to see Barnum in the company of so many other books that I enjoyed this year, including Wonder by R.J. Palacio, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and the delightful Z is for Moose by Kelly Bingham and Paul O. Zelinski.

Washington Post Best Book

I'm so pleased that Barnum's Bones has been selected as a Best Kids Book of 2012 by the Washington Post.  You can check out the whole list here. 

Go Texas!

Great news!  I recently learned that Barnum Brown has been included on the awesome 2013-2014 Texas Bluebonnet Award master list.  Eligible young readers in grades 3-6 who have read at least 5 books on the list can vote for their favorite.  I'm absolutely thrilled to be included in this list of 20 fiction and nonfiction books.  You can check out the list here and vote for Barnum!

Barnum in the Washington Post

Barnum received a wonderful review online yesterday from the Washington Post!  Here's the review:

Like the circus showman he was named for, Barnum Brown (1873-1963) was raised to think big — in his case, dinosaur big. He dug far and wide and deep, discovering more dinosaur bones than anyone else ever has. And in the badlands near Hell Creek, Mont., he was the first to find the king of them all, Tyrannosaurus rex. In this engaging picture-book biography, Tracey Fern and illustrator Boris Kulikov supply many distinctive details about Brown, including the spiffy wardrobe he favored and the dancing talents he would occasionally unleash. But they focus on the excitement of fossil hunting. Barnum evidently felt this enthusiasm early on, following his father’s plow to collect the small, ancient treasures it unearthed. His mentor at New York City’s Museum of Natural History thought Barnum “must be able to smell fossils,” but he apparently relished the work involved on and off the digging site. Kulikov’s inventive, playfully skewed illustrations capture Barnum’s ardent curiosity and forceful presence — he often appears larger than life, as when he’s diving off of “Cuba” (seemingly just a few yards wide) to retrieve a fossil. On the last spread, the scale seems about right, but the concept is truly wild: Barnum Brown riding a very-much-alive T. rex through Central Park. He’s so cool he doesn’t need a saddle.
— Abby McGanney Nolan

Tyrannosaurus Goes to Court

A cousin of Barnum's T. rex recently made the news.  A nearly complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar was up for auction in New York City.  Marc Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, spotted the fully assembled, 24-foot-long skeleton in an auction catalog.  The dinosaur has only been found in Mongolia, and Mr. Norell was concerned that the skeleton had been illegally removed from that country by poachers.  The fossil was purchased at the auction by an anonymous buyer for more than $1,000,000.  However, thanks to a federal civil complaint, the sale was halted and the skeleton is now in federal custody, awaiting resolution of the legal dispute over its ownership.  You can read the full article from The New York Times here.

Barnum in The New York Times

Barnum got a wonderful review in The New York Times.  Here's the review, written by Pamela Paul and published May 23, 2012:

I Found a T. Rex!

‘Barnum’s Bones,’ by Tracey Fern

As a child, Barnum Brown collected fossils — so many that when he filled the front parlor with boxes of them, his mother moved them out to the laundry house. Like so many young boys, Brown became obsessed with dinosaurs. But unlike other boys, he grew up to become one of the nation’s foremost paleontologists and, among other things, discovered the first fossil of Tyrannosaurus rex. 

Tracey Fern (“Buffalo Music,” “Pippo the Fool”) turns a slice of a scientist’s biography into an American adventure tale, describing how Brown and his rivals at other museums raced to find the best fossils and to discover new species. The moment when Brown unearths the first bones belonging to a T. rex is genuinely exciting, though on the next page we learn he couldn’t make it back to the digging site in the badlands of Montana until a few seasons later. How could he be “too busy”?! Fern doesn’t explain. But when he returns, we eagerly take up the story again. 

The illustrations, by Boris Kulikov — who illustrated the wonderful “Max’s Words” and “Max’s Castle,” both by Kate Banks — lends a delightfully comic, almost cartoonish, touch to material that might have been stimulating even as literal illustration-as-exposition. Instead, as in the Max books, Kulikov amplifies the text with glorious depictions of a human being’s wildest imaginings.  

For example, describing Barnum’s realization that a rock brought to him by a friend is actually the horn of a Triceratops, he paints Brown perching the fossilized horn on the snout of a Triceratops outline, drawn like a map in his office, its shape extending beyond the room’s walls into a wild, outdoor landscape. A memorable image shows the dapper Brown (he often prospected in fur coat and bowler hat) dancing with an imaginary dinosaur, his newly discovered T. rex skull aglow in the moonlight behind him.

And of course, there’s the true-fairy-tale ending, with Brown astride a T. rex, lumbering across Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History alight in the distance. As an author’s note explains, when Brown first arrived at the museum, in 1897, the institution didn’t have a single dinosaur specimen in its collection. By the time he died, in 1963, it had the largest collection in the world, most of it assembled by Brown. He has probably made as many children happy as did old P.T. himself.

Starred Review - School Library Journal!

Bravo for Barnum!  I'm so excited to announce that School Library Journal has given Barnum a starred review in its June issue!  Here's the review:

FERN,Tracey.Barnum’s Bones: How Barnum Brown Discovered the Most Famous Dinosaur in the World. illus. by Boris Kulikov. 40p. bibliog. photos. CIP. Farrar/Margaret Ferguson. 2012. Tr $17.99. ISBN 978-0-374-30516-1.LC 2010048846.

K-Gr 4–Barnum Brown had a nose for fossils, trudging along behind his father as he plowed his Kansas fields, picking up ancient clams and corals. And that nose, according to Fern’s chatty, readable text, led to a lifetime of work for the American Museum of Natural History in New York (originally under the guidance of Henry Fairfield Osborn). A brief glimpse at Brown’s early years leads to his expeditions to Patagonia and the American West, and the discovery of his most exciting find–Tyrannosaurus rex. Kulikov’s cartoon illustrations splash across the spreads, their golds, browns, oranges (and an occasional bright blue) forming a perfect backdrop for the text, and for a scattering of correspondence between Brown and Osborn tucked into the endpapers (“Please...send me 1/2 doz. short, heavy chisels….”). An extensive author’s note provides further biographical detail about this productive paleontologist. This book is simpler than Deborah Kogan Ray’s stellar Dinosaur Mountain: Digging into the Jurassic Age (Farrar, 2010), which has a similar format, and is on a par with David Sheldon’s handsome Barnum Brown: Dinosaur Hunter (Walker, 2006). T. rex lovers will gobble it up, and seekers of easy biographies will be hot on their heels.–Patricia Manning, formerly at Eastchester Public Library, NY