1. Thad Longsworth gets a hard start in life: he is orphaned in a frontier town, spending his childhood working in a saloon with no opportunity for an education. Yet he goes on to become 2858 The Bone Wars not only a good and worthwhile person, but someone who contributes important discoveries in science to the whole world. What happens to him in the book that makes this possible?

2. The frontier experience brings out parts of a person's character of which he was scarcely aware before he arrived. What does it do to Julian DeMott? To his father, Algernon?

3. What has brought Jonathan Cabot and Oliver Perkins, young men from wealthy eastern families, into the study of fossils? The badlands of the Dakotas are a far cry from the comforts of upper-class Boston; why do they endure the heat, dust, and danger of the Western frontier...