Fossil Legends of the First Americans

“Engaging, enlightening, and most of all, educationally entertaining. We have precious few examples of Native American interpretation of prehistoric events as they have been passed down through the generations, and in this book Adrienne Mayor unveils several. In so doing, she opens up a new world.”–Jack Horner, coauthor of “Digging Dinosaurs,” Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University

“Adrienne Mayor has absolutely done it again. In “Fossil Legends of the First Americans” she has taken up exactly where she left off last time with “The First Fossil Hunters.” She has done a superb job of researching her topic and making it interesting. Just a wonderful job all around.”–Peter Dodson, author of “The Horned Dinosaurs”

“Adrienne Mayor is a wonderfully independent-minded scholar and a fine writer who works the edge lines between disciplines, where others don’t go. She’s a brilliant researcher but never forgets about character and story. Give her a fossil or a legend, and she’ll supply flesh, blood, narrative, cultural context, and a smile. In this book she also delivers an important sense of justice.”–David Quammen, author of “Monster of God” and “Song of the Dodo”

“A brilliant and well-researched book that creates a new field of inquiry. Mayor opens a wide landscape in which native knowledge and use of fossils becomes an integral part of the academic and popular interest. Undoubtedly a landmark in American thought.”–Vine Deloria, Jr., author of “Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths,” former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians

“This is a surprising, convincing, and most interesting book, which I read with pleasure. It is an intelligent book, one that continues to map out a new field of scholarship of which Mayor is the prime exponent. It is a novel book, because of its unique content and its unusual and yet valuable insight that all ‘scientific’ knowledge does not and need not follow the modern Western tradition.”–Pat Shipman, author of “The Wisdom of Bones” and “The Evolution of Racism”