While at the IAS for the 2019-20 academic year, I will be writing Finding Our Beasts: People, Dinosaurs, and Science in the American West. This book-length ethnography explores paleontological science, education and entertainment at public parks, museums, research facilities, and entertainment sites in the northern Great Plains, the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and other sites where people find dinosaurs and recreations of the prehistoric world. The book examines how people’s encounters with prehistoric creatures incite them to reassess human exceptionalism and their own place in the evolution of life on earth. This rethinking occurs, for instance, when someone who regards dinosaurs as exotic beasts holds an Edmontosaurus vertebra the same shape as their own and recognizes commonalities in their bodies. Through such experiences, people question the dichotomy between humans and animals inherited from the European tradition. Dinosaurs further prompt people to ask whether kinship, sex, race, and species are natural or cultural categories; whether violence and competition are innate behaviors; and whether evolution equates with progress. Close examination of the interactions between people and prehistoric animal-objects reveals that the meanings and values of humanity, animality and materiality are not determined by people alone, but created through intimate yet power-laden relations among humans and matter.