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Making Our Beasts is an ethnography of science in action that uses a familiar topic—dinosaurs—to lead readers to understand science and its objects in new ways. Through fieldwork and interviews conducted at laboratories, dig sites, museums, and entertainment sites, Elana Shever explores vertebrate paleontology in the United States, showing how the practices of scientists and the materiality of fossils together shape the social world and also are shaped by it. Foregrounding elements of scientific inquiry that have been sidelined—including affect, touch, material agency, and the labor of volunteers, technicians, and other nonscientists—Shever reveals how paleontology continues to be structured by race, gender, and colonialism.
Elana Shever is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University and author of Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina.
“A powerful and beautifully written book—I won’t be able to look at US dinomania the same way ever again. Making a compelling case that popular paleontology is an arena for the reenactment of foundational myths of westward expansion, Elana Shever also takes care to show other ways of relating to dinos and their fossils as animals, not beasts.”—Jessica M. Smith, author of Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West
"Our understanding of the history of dinosaur paleontology has been transformed in recent decades, from the heroic tales of exploration and collecting by the great men who revealed the past in museum displays and epic murals to a more complicated story including biases, assumptions, colonialism, and finding (and depicting) what was expected instead of what was really there. Elana Shever carefully walks the line between the two extremes of traditional discovery and postmodern revisionism, thoroughly exploring both but not falling completely for either. Her work is an important contribution to our understanding of one of the greatest threads in American scientific history."—Warren D. Allmon, Director of the Paleontological Research Institution
"In straightforward and compelling prose, Making Our Beasts shows that dinosaur fossils are the creations of biological, geological, and human processes, an insight that opens up new perspectives on science, nature, gender, violence, and much more. Shever is deeply admiring of museums that collect and display dinosaur fossils, while also challenging them to work in new ways."—Douglas Rogers, author of The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism
"Making Our Beasts is a compelling exploration of paleontology and public encounters with dinosaurs and fossils in the United States. It approaches important themes in contemporary anthropology, such as approaches to more-than-human relations and critical reflections on settler colonialism, capitalism, masculinity, and whiteness, in refreshingly clear and accessible language. Richly ethnographic and in generative conversation with a wide range of scholarly literature, the book allows the reader to explore contemporary experiences of encountering dinosaurs and fossils in unexpected ways, incorporating both critique and understanding of the motivations and processes running through these encounters."—Elizabeth Emma Ferry, author of Minerals, Collecting, and Value Across the US-Mexico Border
270 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 color images, 1 map
9780520416727$34.95|£30.00Paper
Dec 2025