Dinosaur in a Haystack

Previus owner's name on front page.

His seventh collection of natural history essays opens with a glorious piece on the reaction of New Yorkers to a solar eclipse, and closes with an appreciation of Greek bus stops... Baseball metaphors lurk in the shadows of medieval cathedrals the better to illustrate an arcane point about fossils... and yes, the dinosaur is discovered at last in a `haystack', thus supporting a gripping theory about the last great extinction...