Pt. one: The Jeffersonians
Fossil hunters on the frontier
Big Bone Lick
Franklin, Jefferson, and the incognitum
Jefferson's "great-claw" and a world about to change
The first American dinosaurs: an eighteenth-century mystery story
Fossils and show business: Mr. Peale's Mastodon
Pt. two: Fossils and geology
Fossils and extinction: dangerous ideas
Mary Anning's world
An American natural science
An American geology
Bad lands: no time for ideas
Dr. Leidy's dinosaur
Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden
Pt. three: Giant Saurians and horned mammals
Kansas and a new regime
Entry of the gladiators
Riding the rails
The first Yale college expedition
The competition begins
Buffalo land: who was Professor Paleozoic?
1872: the year of conflict
The case of the great horned mammals
Going separate ways
Two into four won't go
To the Black Hills
To the Judith River
Pt. four: Toward the twentieth century
The rise of dinosaurs
The good, the bad, and the ugly
Going public
1890: the end of the beginning
Appendixes
The geological column
Leidy on evolution
Cope on evolution.