Reading guide

After Dinosaurs is, on its surface, a novel about the Bone Wars. Beneath that, it is about any race where winning displaces the work itself — including one the present is living through now. A fuller guide is in preparation. To begin:

Names outrunning bones

Cope and Marsh rushed to name species before the fossils were understood — priority over knowledge. The industry's version: capability claims, benchmark scores, and launch announcements outrunning understanding of what the systems are.

The scoreboard

The novel's telegraph clerk keeps a literal scorecard of the feud — and discovers it doesn't come out even. Leaderboards make competition legible, and legibility turns a catastrophe into a game.

The wire

The war ran on infrastructure: rail, freight, telegraph, credit. Genius gets the biography; systems do the work. Then as now.

“Be faithful to the evidence, and patient with the earth”

The novel's governing line, given to Joseph Leidy — the one figure the book never ironizes. It is also this project's ethic: fidelity over speed, patience over priority — arguably the instruction most needed now.