Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

A paleontologist sits in his office, studying ancient dinosaur tracks and extrapolating the scene in the ancient past that created them. And then a man walks in with a job offer and a cooler containing the head of a freshly-dead stegosaurus.

Bones of the Earth is a celebration of dinosaurs and the pursuit of knowledge, wrapped around a lot of twisty time travel and the adventures of time-traveling paleontologists, some of whom get trapped in time and keep getting distracted from their observations by the subjects of their study trying to eat them.

I’ve re-read this book and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter every couple years since they came out, though I’ve never fallen in love with any of Swanwick’s other novels. (I haven’t yet read The Iron Dragon’s Mother.)

But what I really want to talk about is the ending, which I recall was extremely polarizing. In fact I recall that most people hated it. I loved it. For me the ending took the book from being an exceptionally good sf adventure to being something that would stay with me ever since I read it.

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Bones of the Earth