A Dinosaur Named Sue by Pat Relf (2000)

Subtitle: The Story of the Colossal Fossil

I had the wonderful experience of meeting this author at our Cornell reunion. We had graduated the same year, but never knew each other back in college. She lives close to me, so we met for lunch, where I discovered she is the author of many non-fiction children's books. WorldCat lists her as the author of 87 (there are duplicates in that list) and my library has three of her kids books, her masters dissertation, and a book of local World War II memories in Archives. Two of the kids books are Magic School Bus books and over in the Education library (one checked out), so I checked out this one on Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton over in the Chicago Field Museum.

I believe I have mentioned in this blog, that I love children's and young adult books, and sometimes turn to kids books when I want a clear explanation of something. When my son was studying the Civil War in grade school, I realized that I didn't really "get" the Civil War, especially after we visited Gettysburg and saw the massive destruction that occurred in this three day battle. So I went to our kid section and took out a few books that made the war much more understandable to me. Obviously it is an art to take complex topics and make them clear to others. The best teachers do this, good children's authors do this, and Pat Relf definitely does this.

This tells the story of Sue, the largest and most complete set of Tyrannosaurus Rex bones - how they were found, the legal battles, how they were auctioned off, how they were stored, cleaned, studied, and put together for a display. What did we know about T. Rex before, what new things we learned from these bones. Just enough information for me with the things that interested me and plenty of pictures.

Now I have dozens of questions for Pat - how did she work on this book, did she get to interview the people, see the scientists work on the bones, or was she just given a pile of "stuff" and asked to make sense of it into a book?