Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway

An Epoch Tale of a Scientist and an Artist on the Ultimate 5,000-Mile Paleo Road Trip

by ,

Paperback, 208 pages

English language

Published October 2007 by Fulcrum Books.

ISBN:
978-1-55591-451-6
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OCLC Number:
125404857
Goodreads:
1082138

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5 stars (1 review)

Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway follows the zany travels of a paleontologist and an artist as they drive across the American West in search of fossils. Throughout their journey, they encounter "paleonerds" like themselves, men and women dedicated to finding everything from suburban T. rexes to killer Eocene pigs to ancient fossilized forests. Much of their travels are spent in remote places few people visit, where they discover small-town museums packed with paleontological treasures, rock quarries that have yielded hundreds of fossilized bones, and the remains of ancient seashores tracked with the footprints of dinosaurs. What soon becomes evident is that fossils are everywhere; it only takes knowing what to look for to find them—even at 65 miles per hour.

2 editions

reviewed Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway by Kirk Johnson

Fascinating descriptions & art of western US fossil sites

5 stars

Paleobotanist Kirk Johnson and artists Ray Troll take an epic road trip through fossil beds & museums of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah and New Mexico, describing & drawing the flora, fauna & geology of the lands that were buried under the Great Plains and then uplifted back into surface proximity by the Rocky Mountains. Troll's artwork steals the show. If you've seen his shirts you now the distinctive style. Sadly, either I got a bit inured or the book just tails off a bit toward the end, where it feels more like a mad dash to get back to Denver on time than the more thoughtful gee-whiz exploration that it starts off as. This is the recently published second edition, and a lot of the narrative has been updated to reflect happenings since the original publication in 2007.

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