Paleontology in the United States

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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.