Welcome to the One Book, One Community Middle School Reading Program
May 19, 20, 21, 2025
Join us as we learn about the world of Dinosaurs
About the Author
Formerly on the faculty of the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Deb has also taught writing and literature at Emerson College and Western New England College, and was a Visiting Writer in Lesley University’s MFA in Writing for Young People program.
She’s a regular faculty presenter at retreats and conferences, as both author and editor, including Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) weekends in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin as well as events for the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Vermont College, Big Sur Writers Workshop, the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA), the Texas Book Festival, the Burlington Book Festival, the Salem Book Festival, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and others. In 2007, Deb was honored as one of the Boston Public Library’s Literary Lights for Children.
About the Book
Today we take for granted the idea that dinosaurs once roamed the earth. But two hundred years ago, the very concept of an extinct species did not exist. When an English scientist proposed in 1841 that Dino Saurs (“terrible lizards”) had come and gone, it was only a theory, a new way of explaining the “dragon” and “giant” bones scattered across the globe. But when proof turned up seventeen years later, it was not only incontrovertible; it was massive.
Tooth and Claw tells the story of the feverish race between two brilliant, driven, and insanely competitive scientists–Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh–to uncover more and more monstrous fossils in the newly opened Wild West. Between them, they discovered dozens of major dinosaur species and established the new discipline of paleontology in America. But their bitter thirty-year rivalry–a “war” waged on wild plains and mountains, in tabloid newsprint, and in Congress–dramatically wrecked their professional and private lives even as it brought alive for the public a vanished prehistoric world.
