Tyrannosaur Canyon is the first in the Wyman Ford series. Though the cover leads the reader to think this is a reboot of Jurassic Park, it is not. Rather than dealing with the de-extinction of lost dinosaurs through DNA manipulation, Tyrannosaur Canyon is a contemporary thriller based on fossil hunters, the hunt for the one great dinosaur find, and the potential financial gain for such a find.
Preston uses the “moon rocks” from the Apollo 17 moon landing and dialogue from the mission transcripts to lend authenticity to the prologue to the story. Though it seems quite disparate to a tale set in the Southwest of the United Staes, he does pull these diverse strings together.
Geologist Marston Weathers is killed by an assassin while in the desert after having found his lifelong dream of the one BIG dino find. A local veterinarian, riding in the area, hears the shots and finds the dying Weathers who gives him a journal and asks the vet to deliver the book to Weathers’ daughter. From this point, multiple villains chase the vet angling to retrieve the journal and claim jump the geologist’s find. There are references to early artificial intelligence and weapons that will appeal to sci-fi nerds. Notably there is very little female stereotyping here except for descriptions of the veterinarian’s wife.
I grew up wanting to be an archeologist or paleontologist and fossils and dinos are near and dear to my heart. Tyrannosaur Canyon is knowledgeably written. It even references a once-favorite read, paleontologist Bob Bakker’s The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction from way back in 1986 which was a seminal, paradigm-shifting text I read aloud to my own young budding paleontologist while he was in grade school. This is not great literature but is a fun read.
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Tyrannosaur Canyon (Forge Books, August 29, 2006) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my reviews of other Douglas Preston books as well as those he’s co-authored with Lincoln Child here:
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