The Bonedigger's Daughter

What's it like to find dinosaur bones in your backyard? How does it feel to find the first Stegosaurus bones ever and then partner with a scientist at Yale in a race to find and classify the most dinosaur skeletons? But what if you're a girl and girls don't get to do things like that? The Bonedigger's Daughter by Sheryl Peterson is the story of Sarah "Sadie" Ellen Felch and her father Marshall Felch, and Yale Professor Othniel Charles Marsh in Canon City, Colorado in the 1870s and 1880s. This book includes Sadie's drawings of the bones she found and cleaned, letters she wrote, and photographs of the bones from the Natural History Museum of London. She even worked out how to fit the bones together into complete skeletons, and marked where they went together in her drawings.

I felt in secure hands with Sheryl Peterson's account of the early days of paleontology in which two scientists hired farmers to hunt for dinosaur bones on their farms. I shared her disappointment upon learning that Sadie's and her father's names are not on Yale's display of the dinosaur bones they found. I was particularly pleased to see her interpretation of the close and trusting relationship between Sadie and her father. I hope this book will encourage other girls to go into the sciences and learn new things. I hope it will also encourage parents to support their children in their explorations. The Bonedigger's Daughter is recommended for schools, libraries, and families of children who like to hunt for rocks and fossils in the wild. - Five Star Review, Readers' Favorite