Pt. one: The Jeffersonians -- Fossil hunters on the frontier -- Big Bone Lick -- Franklin, Jefferson, and the incognitum -- Jefferson's "great-claw" and a world about to change -- The first American dinosaurs: an eighteenth-century mystery story -- Fossils and show business: Mr. Peale's Mastodon -- Pt. two: Fossils and geology -- Fossils and extinction: dangerous ideas -- Mary Anning's world -- An American natural science -- An American geology -- Bad lands: no time for ideas -- Dr. Leidy's dinosaur -- Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden -- Pt. three: Giant Saurians and horned mammals -- Kansas and a new regime -- Entry of the gladiators -- Riding the rails -- The first Yale college expedition -- The competition begins -- Buffalo land: who was Professor Paleozoic? -- 1872: the year of conflict -- The case of the great horned mammals -- Going separate ways -- Two into four won't go -- To the Black Hills -- To the Judith River -- Pt. four: Toward the twentieth century -- The rise of dinosaurs -- The good, the bad, and the ugly -- Going public -- 1890: the end of the beginning -- Appendixes -- The geological column -- Leidy on evolution -- Cope on evolution.