At first, they only see cliffs in the prairie. Then a few bumps in the rock. And as they carefully chop the chisel into the wall, huge chunks fall to their heads. Teeth. How to imagine that of dragons. The researcher and his student can hardly breathe: that's twice as big as anything they know. It had to have "thundered", "when he left". A thunder lizard, then: the brontosaurus.

A few teeth, ribs, vertebrae. That's enough to stretch your imagination. We fill the interstices of these fossil lumps with soft tissue, skin, muscle mass, color. Make us a picture of the unimaginable. Because there are no traditions, no witnesses, only these bones. Bittschön: Dino, ready.

imago / United Archives

Crichton movie "Jurassic Park III"

So, when an author takes on this earth phase, of which only skeletons remain, it is always a game with the limits of the imagination. And Michael Crichton, who died ten years ago, was a specialist in bordering areas - not just because of "Jurassic Park" (ie: the novel, not Spielberg's equally fanciful film version).

Now with "Dragon Teeth" a kind of precursor appears: over the greed of the researchers, who set out as dinosaur pioneers.

AP

Author Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

Although it is a manuscript from 1974 that Crichton's wife found after his death, "Dragon Teeth" is best-kept amusement literature with bone-dry humor sitting inconspicuously like fossil dust between the lines. Crichton's talent for packing scientific topics into popcorn-ready formats, as well as his final novel, the genetic engineering fantasy "Next", is already obvious here.

It sounds like a blockbuster idea by Barry Sonnenfeld: Crichton puts his Dino story in the Wild West of 1876, in the midst of the Yale student William Johnson, milk son of a millionaire. But the guys he travels through Wyoming and Montana, dressed like cowboys, riding horses and meeting the Sioux and Crow are neither cowboys nor gold diggers. They are paleontologists with their students. In search of other valuable mineral resources: dinosaur fossils.

Custom Made Popcorn Hero

Johnson, Crichton's hero, has the role of " Fish out of Water, " as out of place in the Wild West as Charlie Chaplin in "Gold Rush." In the summer expedition of the paleo-Prof Othniel C. Marsh, he hires only for a $ 1000 bet. And then gets caught between the fronts of the legendary bone warfare that Marsh carries out with his rival Edward Cope. Both were obsessed with determining most of the new dinosaur species - at a time when the existence of these prehistoric creatures was more controversial than today's climate change in the White House. And in which it had just become possible to get rid of the bone mountains at all, thank the railway.

Marsh, Cope, their student demolition trips, the bone war: all that really existed. Two guys attacking and fooling around in their camps in the vast wastelands of the West at night for the glory of science: historic reality threw the perfect story at Crichton's feet. (From other perspectives, by the way, in two great new nonfiction books: In "Extinct to Stay", in which the biologist Bernhard Kegel also analyzes the pop culture of the dinosaurs, and in the reportage-like "Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs" by paleontologist Steve Brusatte. )

DISPLAY

Michael Crichton:
Dragon Teeth. How it all started

From the American by Klaus Berr

Blessing, 320 pages, 22 euros

Order at Amazon. Order from Thalia.

With his kotzbrockigen boy William Johnson, who can hardly distinguish a Smith & Wesson from the excavation brush, Crichton found for his popcorn novel a hero to measure. He slams one obstacle after another in his path. In the end, by itself, Johnson must maneuver the largest treasure of the expedition through the wildest parts of the Wild West: the Dragon's Teeth - the Tusks of Brontosaurus. A new breed of dinosaur that Johnson has knocked out of the rocks with Cope, far bigger than anything the researcher has ever seen. And it's actually assumed that it was Marsh, not Cope, who discovered the Brontosaurus. But this was apparently under Crichton under the author.

Nevertheless, the mixture makes this book just for the sake of entertainment: because of the paleontological meticulousness with which Crichton describes the excavation work. Because of the odyssey he sent Johnson with the precious boxes, the most exciting slapstick with raids, scoundrels, saloons, the usual. Above all, because he tells all this, not without showing the brutality with which the army robbed the First Nations of their land. Or the naturalness with which researchers simply took what was there.