About the Author

     Cress Kearny, this book's author and editor, grew up in the area of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah featured in The Mysterians. He found a small Brontosaurus in his early teens and collected agatized dinosaur bone for forty years while following developments in paleontology and biology. These interests, together with readings in history and the philosophy of science, are some of the tools he's used to try to understand science's place in, or misapplication to, our lives and our world. He received a B.A. in the History of Art from Dartmouth College and worked with his wife in the Peace Corps for four years in Sierra Leone at a time when government corruption was beginning to lead that country into the lower depths. Many of his concerns about the nature of culture and history were shaped by that experience and by what happened in Sierra Leone over the next two decades. After the Peace Corps he and his wife settled in California, their base for work and reading when not hiking, backpacking and climbing throughout the mountains and deserts of the West. He now lives with his wife, Lynn, and a cat, Louie Catorze, in Oakland.

     His articles have appeared in Lapidary Journal, Gems and Minerals, and Jeweler's Bench. In 1991 his close-up photography of agatized dinosaur bone narrowly missed publication by Natural History magazine.

“The avant-garde is not an exclusive locus of courage; a principled stand within a reconstituted rear unit may call down just as much ridicule and demand equal fortitude. Crowds do not always rush off in admirable or defendable directions.”

Stephen J. Gould

Paleontologist and Savvy Progressive