Boxcar Children

The Dinosaur Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1995.

The Alden children and their cousin Soo Lee are visiting the Pickering Natural History Museum to help Mr. and Mrs Diggs, who are on the museum’s board of directors, to set up a new dinosaur exhibit. They will be staying in the Diggs’s apartment, which is connected to the museum by a tunnel. The children love the rooms where they will be staying because they’re decorated with spare exhibits from the museum!

However, very quickly, they notice that strange things are happening at the museum. The alarms seem to go off sometimes for no reason. The night watchman, Pete, is new at the museum and acts oddly. He seems to like having fun with the exhibits more than paying attention to security. On their first night there, Jessie sees a light in the museum windows, in the dinosaur room, where nobody is supposed to be, and she thinks that she sees the shadow of the dinosaur skeleton moving.

The next day, the Aldens meet the other staff at the museum. Dr. Eve Skyler operates the planetarium, and she’s very protective of it. She’s been upset because renovations at the museum have messed up the planetarium. When the Diggs tell her that the Alden children are there to help clean up, Dr. Skyler is dubious and worries that the children will damage the equipment, but the Diggs tell them that the children have worked in museums before.

After the children clear the planetarium and take a lunch break, they catch Dr. Sklyer moving some things that they had thrown out back into the planetarium! When they confront her about what she’s doing, she denies everything, and it ends up taking the children almost twice as long to finish the task. The children don’t know what Dr. Skyler’s problem is and why she would want to sabotage their cleaning of the planetarium when she had badly wanted it cleaned.

When Dr. Titus Pettibone, who is the fossil expert in charge of the dinosaur room, returns from a trip, he discovers that bones are missing from the tyrannosaurus skeleton! Benny and Soo Lee are sure that Dr. Pettibone was the man they saw sneaking around the museum the night before. Dr. Pettibone avoids their questions about sneaking around the museum and is every bit as opposed to the children working on the new dinosaur exhibit as Dr. Skyler is about the children helping to clean the planetarium.

Then, someone removes all the posters that the children put up about the new dinosaur exhibit. Mrs. Diggs knows that someone removed them on purpose because, when she asks people at the places where the children put them up, they say that a woman took them, saying that she wanted them as souvenirs. In spite of that, everyone in town knows about the new exhibit because word about the missing dinosaur bones has spread. Is someone trying to drive people away from the new exhibit, or are things that have been happening part of a publicity stunt? The children known that someone is sneaking around the museum, especially at night, and both Dr. Skyler and Dr. Pettibone seem to have something to hide.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

One of the first things that I noticed about the book is that many of the characters have pun names – Mr. and Mrs. Diggs, who operate the natural history museum; Dr. Sklyer, who is in charge of the planetarium; and Pettibone, who is the fossil expert.

The book does a good job of making everyone look equally guilty. From the beginning, I suspected that was because there are multiple people doing multiple things for different reasons, and it helps to make the mystery more complicated and involved, keeping readers guessing.

This is another instance of the Alden children having the opportunity to do something unusual and build work experience because of their grandfather’s connections. Their grandfather knows Mr. and Mrs. Diggs and arranges for the children to stay with them, and their previous experiences with museums, like in one of the later books, The Mystery of the Mummy’s Curse, were also due to Mr. Alden’s connections. Although the children’s grandfather allows the children to have independent adventures without him, he is usually the one who sets them up in the stories. Most real children never get opportunities like this and may not be allowed to do some of the things the Alden children do because of rules regarding volunteers, especially juvenile volunteers, due to insurance liabilities. I would have loved to work in a museum when I was a kid, but my family never had the connections that the Aldens do.

I can understand why children aren’t allowed to do certain jobs. Dr. Pettibone is correct that there are certain tasks that require specialized knowledge and delicacy. After he warms up to the kids more, he begins showing the children some of the details of his work and what his equipment does. He lets Violet do some of the delicate work after he shows her what to do because she does artwork and plays the violin, so she is accustomed to fine, detailed work. In real life, though, I don’t think that a 10-year-old child would be allowed to do this kind of work as quickly or as well as Violet does in the story. The Aldens have to learn to do things quickly in the interest of time in their stories, and they rarely make the kinds of mistakes that beginners do at anything they try.

I have done volunteer work in museums as an adult, and one thing that they don’t tell you in this book is that, when you see an assembled dinosaur skeleton in a museum, it’s probably all or partly a plaster model of the bones rather than the real bones. That’s because fossilized bones are no longer actual bone. They are petrified, so they are as heavy as other stones. When you have stones the size of large dinosaur bones, it’s extremely difficult to mount them so that they stand up, like the dinosaur would in real life. Sometimes, plaster models also fill in for bones that are missing from an incomplete skeleton. Complete skeletons are very, very rare. There were only two places where there were real dinosaur bones on exhibit in the last museum where I volunteered. One was a dinosaur thigh bone that visitors were allowed to touch to learn what fossilized bone feels like. The other was a collection of pterosaur wing bones mounted on a wall, where no one could touch them, and it wasn’t a complete wing. Some museums have exhibits marked so you know which bones are models and which are real fossils.

I also liked the art style in this book. Boxcar Children books vary in art style because they were produced over multiple decades, but my favorite illustrations are the ones that look the most realistic. I think realistic illustration styles are best for this book in particular because they show the details of the dinosaur skeleton realistically.