Is Dragon Teeth Based On A True Story?

Just finished watching a load of documentaries about the Bone Wars, so I picked up ‘Dragon Teeth’ (Crichton). Crichton took a lot of liberties with history of the two men involved in the Bone Wars – the Marsh and Cope feud is legendary, and includes loads of examples of the sabotage, bribery, and even theft involved by both sides. But William Johnson, the Yale student who gets caught up in the middle of it all? Entirely a creation of the author to act as a vehicle for the reader to learn about the time in which he is set. As a historical novel it works very well, and gives a cracking good sense of the atmosphere of the place and time – scorching desert landscapes, rough-and-tumble frontier towns, etc. etc.

It is clear that Crichton has taken many liberties with the history in order to better serve the story that he is trying to tell. While at times he compresses the timeline between events or even made up entire encounters, these choices seem to serve a greater purpose in capturing the essence of the time in which the book is set. Some events were even portrayed more accurately than they had occurred in real life, including the methods of excavation that were used to obtain the fossils of dinosaurs, as well as the ‘frenzy’ that gripped the public over ‘dragon bones.’ All in all, this book is a very odd mix of very accurate research and pure imagination, but in the end it makes for a better story than would a purely accurate biography of these time. History buffs will certainly be able to point out many of the seams that the author tried to sew together in order to make his fiction seem more realistic, but for the layperson it is a very fun read.

Michael Crichton’s ‘Dragon Teeth’ is one of those novels that blends fact and fiction to the extent that you can become utterly bewildered and swept away by it. At its core is a historical adventure which is set during the Bone Wars (a term coined by Crichton), the term given to the ferocious rivalry between two great scientists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, who during the 1870s and 80s engaged in a frenetic race to uncover the greatest number of dinosaur fossils for the scientific community. Here Crichton takes the two men and the historical events surrounding their discoveries and interweaves them with the story of his entirely fictional young hero, William Johnson, a recent college graduate who is sent out to the frontier as part of a rag-tag exploratory party in search of skeletons of long extinct creatures.

One can certainly sense Crichton’s love of both history and the adventure novel in this entertaining work of fiction. His research is clearly manifest in the evocatively detailed depiction of the two frontiers towns in which most of the action takes place, and his re-creation of the ruthless and often dirty world of the fossil hunters is fully convincing. But as with any good adventure novel, the often-detailed dialogue is well used, the many dangers that confront our protagonist are quite credibly and vividly presented, and the story is a fun, gritty, and often odd one. If one reads the book expecting a documentary on paleontology in the mid-19th century, one will likely be disappointed; but if one is ready for a thrilling adventure of a novel with one foot planted firmly in the hard facts of history, then Dragon Teeth is a wonderful read.

Ponderous and uneven, ‘Dragon Teeth’ is a posthumous work by Michael Crichton that attempts to combine a Western with a dinosaur hunter thriller. Instead, the structural center of the book becomes the so-called ‘Bone Wars’ – the infamous and apparently very funny rivalry between two paleontologists, Marsh and Cope. A clueless outsider gets caught up in the middle of the three-way conflict of interest, in a story of gunfights and double-crosses, mostly set in the dirt of the American West. In the end, though fictional, it’s based on actual history, and the rather enjoyable alternative to reality which Crichton rendered so masterfully. A technically accurate ‘fill-in’ of history’s blanks to amuse and thrill us with the best kind of gossip.