Novacek does an excellent job describing the realities of fieldwork. It is not as simple as finding a complete and articulated dinosaur skeleton in the sand, as shown in the first Jurassic Park movie. Instead, Novacek and his colleagues often spend weeks searching unsuccessfully for bones. He also describes the common ailments of fieldwork: dehydration and diarrhea, as well as broken-down vehicles, food poisoning and stings from scorpions.
After completing his PhD in paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley and a postdoctural at San Diego State University, Novacek becomes a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is here that, in 1984, Dr. Paul Raty, a veterinarian from Chile, visits Novacek and shows him photographs of fossil whale vertebrae that Raty's uncle had found in the Andes Mountains. Novacek organizes a field expedition to Chile in the hopes that their finds will help to increase understanding of the geological history of South America. A few days into the expedition, Novacek's horse bucks. He attempts to dismount, but his foot is caught in one of the stirrups and he is dragged overland, dangling from the stirrup, by the panicked horse. Battered, bruised and bloodied, Novacek refuses to return to the expedition's hotel and instead decides to continue their search for the fossil whales, despite having to limp about painfully.
Chile keeps Novacek occupied for several years before he decides to join an expedition to Yemen that plans an extensive geological and paleontological survey. Novacek's adventures are far from over, as he and his colleagues are detained by a group of Yemeni soldiers with AK-47s. In direct contrast, the members of the expedition later receive an invitation to a party at the lavish home of an Arabian businessman who owned a successful vegetable market in Detroit. Unfortunately, despite their adventures with the people of Yemen, the expedition finds very little in the way of fossils, and the following year they are unexpectedly invited to work in Mongolia.
