Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton passed away in 2008, but his found the manuscript for a novel titled Dragon Teeth in his archives, which will be released next year. It is apparently complete enough to be published without major editing or the publisher hiring another writer to finish the novel.
Image: Crichton in 2002, Frederick M. Brown / Stringer/Getty Images
Dragon Teeth is set during the Bone Wars, a period in the 19th century where paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, fuelled by a hilariously unprofessional hatred, competed to find the most dinosaurs. This included attacking each other in the press, blocking one another from digging in certain places, and damaging fossils to keep their rival from getting their hands on them.
Dragon Teeth‘s protagonist is the fictional William Johnson, who apprentices with both, making “discoveries of historic proportion” and becoming “an inspiring hero only Crichton could have imagined,”according to the publisher, HarperCollins. The book will be released next May.