The Dinosaur Dealers by John Long, Allen and Unwin, A$27.22, ISBN 1865088293 Reviewed by Jeff Hecht
LIKE a traditional mystery, The Dinosaur Dealers opens with a crime and a matrix of uneasy tensions. The crime is the October 1996 theft of two stegosaur footprints from the remote coast of Western Australia. The prints are sacred to the local Aborigines and valuable to science, because stegosaur tracks are particularly rare. The tensions are between the scientists who study fossils and the dealers who make their livings selling them.
Talk with academic palaeontologists, and you find a sometimes-grudging respect for many professional…
