Dinosaurs and the Mid-Life Crisis

The way a mid-life crisis manifests itself differs from person to person. Some people might suddenly decide to take up sky diving, others are driven to purchase a shiny car they can’t afford. A rare few, as in Richard Polsky’s case, may feel an overwhelming urge to find a Tyrannosaurus rex. With his career as an art dealer in stasis, Polsky writes in the introduction to his travelogue memoir Boneheads, it was time “to experience life all over again,” and a search for the most famous predator of all time seemed like just the thing.

Finding a Tyrannosaurus is no easy task. Even though more than 43 specimens have been found to date and the dinosaur is one of the most completely known of all dinosaurs, you can’t simply walk out into the field and expect to find a complete tyrant skull smiling back at you. Polsky seems to understand this, and so he fashioned himself as a fossil gadfly—buzzing around fossil dealers and commercial fossil hunters in the hope that one of them will lead him to his quarry. His quest was not to discover a Tyrannosaurus for a museum or to understand something about the animal’s biology—Boneheads is almost devoid of any scientific content—but instead merely to find a tyrant to call his own.