Dinosaur-sized conflicts

COEUR d'ALENE - Author Russell Ferrell will be at Hastings Entertainment from 1-4 p.m. Sept. 21 to sign copies of his book, "The Bone War of McCurtain County."

Released last summer, "The Bone War of McCurtain County" is a true story about two amateur naturalists who discovered and excavated Oklahoma's State Dinosaur (the Acrocanthosaurus) and made their mark on the scientific world. This was one of the greatest dinosaur discoveries and excavations in history. Combining science and history, the author presents the facts to readers in an exciting epic adventure story.

The story begins in 1983 when two Oklahomans uncovered a few gigantic bones while hunting rocks and crystals in southeastern Oklahoma. They had tapped into a cache of buried treasure lodged inside the wall of a polluted waste-holding pit near the banks of the Mountain Fork River. After securing permission to excavate from the landowner and unearthing this cluster of riches over a span of four years, the two men became embroiled in a bitter conflict with powerful institutions over ownership rights to the prize. Cephis Hall and his friend Sid Love, a Choctaw Indian, were swept up in a whirlwind of controversy as they battled the largest landowner in the world and its friends in government and academia. Their lives were changed forever, and so was McCurtain County.

The Acrocanthosaurus was the apex predator of North America during the early Cretaceous Period, some 45 million years before T. Rex arrived on the scene. The giant theropod dinosaur was about the size of T. Rex and equally ferocious. It hunted giant sauropods weighing more than 100 tons.

This was a very rare and valuable specimen. Until Hall and Love's discovery, remains of the Acro were scanty and fragmentary; consequently, the elusive monster had remained a mystery since the first pieces were uncovered in Atoka County, Okla., in the early 1950s by two legendary Oklahoma scientists, J. Willis Stovall and Wann Langston. With the recovery by Hall and Love, scientists were able to put the puzzle together and build a full cast replica of the beast showing exactly what it looked like. Cast displays of the Hall-Love skeleton are now on exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, Graffham Hall at the Goddard Museum in Sulphur, Okla., and the Museum of the Red River in Idabel, Okla., among others.

Ferrell has worked as an educator, journalist, home builder and cattle rancher. He lives in Red Oak, Texas, with his wife, Waynetta, and their four dogs and three cats. Before moving to Texas, he owned and operated a cattle ranch north of Durant, Okla.