Time Traveler by Michael Novacek, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, ISBN 0374278806
FOSSIL enthusiasts must envy Michael Novacek’s job. It’s a plum: he’s curator of palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It all began in downtown LA, which might not seem the most inspiring childhood environment for a wannabe fossil hunter.
But as we learn from Novacek’s autobiographical Time Traveller, a diet of movies such as King Kong and the life-size statues of mammoths and sabretooth cats at the nearby Rancho La Brea Park fired the imagination of a solitary child. Other tendencies that set him on the path to palaeontology…
