A Dinosaur Named Ruth, old soul, patient story telling with charm

I wanted more. That is not something that you think to yourself after many books. A Dinosaur Named Ruth brings up that thought as soon as you read the last word on the final two pages that show a young girl, and a dinosaur, looking wistfully into the prairie. It’s also not the story that you know. The dinosaur was called Sue, wasn’t it? Well, a dinosaur was called that, however, this story has more numerous subjects, and one that plays out in a more patient manner. It’s also worth noting that Ruth (the dinosaur) was discovered by its more famous T-Rex dinosaur who was found just down the road.  

It starts in 1905 when a seven-year-old girl is playing in her backyard. South Dakota had just been declared a state just under two decades ago, so her area to play in is massive and her neighbors are rarely seen. Ruth Mason is a curious kid who lets her imagination follow her feet as she goes on walkabout, exploring the endless backyard. She’s not a paleontologist, rock hound, or bone hunter, nor is she receiving any pressure from her parents to study STEM. Ruth is just curious and one day she finds odd-looking things in the ground.

She puts them in her apron pocket and goes back home. Ruth is loaded with questions about these items and peppers her family about what they could possibly be. Her parents aren’t any help, so she starts to write museums and experts at universities about the strange rocks or bones she’s finding on her farm. All of those people write back and say that it’s nothing special and not to put too much thought into it.

However, Ruth knew the land and knew that these things weren’t just rocks that anybody could find in the Badlands. She continued living in that farmhouse, taking care of the animals, earning a living, finding those things, and writing to supposed experts about old things. As she got older she put all of these things into her bone garden, a place in the back yard where she arranged them in mosaic shapes.

Then, when she was about 80 years old, a fossil hunter knocked on her door. Rick Brooks was looking for the bones of sea creatures that he thought lived in the area millions of years ago. Ruth knew that she didn’t have any fish fossils, but invited him to see the bone garden that she’d been compiling for the past seven decades.

Finally, in 1979 a team of dinosaur experts arrived at her land, near that farmhouse in the Badlands. They found all sorts of bones, teeth, and things under the ground, just the way they’d always been in Ruth’s imagination. Their excavation lasted for just under 15 years and yielded just under 100 dinosaur fossils of varying completion. One full-size, and almost complete Edmontosaurus is on display in Wales. It’s named after the lady who showed the paleontologist such kindness during the years that they were digging on her farm where hoards of duckbilled dinosaurs once lived.

A Dinosaur Named Ruth is an illustrated book whose art by Alexandra Bye really compliments the story by Julia Lyon. The bulk of Ruth’s life was about collecting fossils and patiently waiting for the paleontology community to catch up with her. The art really captures the scope of the Badlands and how a young girl would have explored the area. It’s also ironic that a book about dinosaurs has very few illustrations of dinosaurs.

There’s only one two-page spread that shows how the duckbilled dinosaurs might have looked as they strolled around their lush, tropical surroundings. The cover of the book has a couple of them, but look closely and you’ll notice that they’re translucent and allow the background to be seen through them.

The text in the book is intelligent and sparse. The sparseness adds to the fact that Ruth’s discovery took a long time to be realized. A Dinosaur Named Ruth is a great, good night book because it’s just long enough to be read once at bedtime, yet short enough to be re-read more than once and interesting enough that young readers will want to spend time alone with the book. It also plants seeds of interest that make kids want to read more about the subject matter. That issue is solved by the author’s notes and the bibliography at the back of the book. This is illustrated book gold for those curious kids who want to learn more but might not realize it yet.

A Dinosaur Named Ruth, How Ruth Mason Discovered Fossils In Her Own Backyard is by Julia Lyon with illustrations by Alexandra Bye and available on Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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