The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  For decades the federal government debated whether and how to regulate fossil collecting, particularly regarding vertebrates, which are less common than invertebrates. The most extreme-minded paleontologists have long wanted a ban on commercial collecting, but commercial hunters organized against the idea. They defended their trade, and paleontologists defended the objects fundamental to their science.

  Despite experience and field expertise, dealers who call themselves “commercial paleontologists” are not in fact paleontologists. Paleontology would not exist without them, though. The science started at the hands of natural history lovers—started long before the words science and paleontology even existed—and became perhaps the only discipline with a commercial aspect that simultaneously infuriates scientists and claims a legitimate role in the pantheon of discovery. The work of commercial hunters has allowed paleontologists some of their biggest breakthroughs and museums their most stunning displays. Museum visitors may not realize they’re often looking at specimens discovered not by scientists but rather by lay people like themselves. A California boy named Harley Garbani became obsessed with fossils in the 1930s, after finding part of a camel femur while following in the tracks of his father’s plow. He became a plumber but went on to find extraordinary, tiny fossils by crawling on his hands and knees in “cheaters” (jewelers’ goggles), plus the first significant Triceratops skeleton in over half a century and a T. rex skeleton so good it would take years for someone to come across a better one. By the time Garbani died, in 2011, he had collected for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the University of California–Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. Lowell Dingus, an American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) paleontologist who knew Garbani while in grad school at Berkeley, called him “among the greatest fossil collectors that ever lived and the greatest one that I have ever known and worked with.”

  A more recent collector was Stan Sacrison, an electrician and plumber from Harding County, South Dakota, the self-declared “T. rex Capital of the World.” In the 1980s and ’90s, Sacrison found such notable rex specimens that with each new discovery his twin brother, Steve, a part-time gravedigger and equally gifted fossil hunter, carved notches into the handle of his Bobcat earthmover. Discovering even one or part of one T. rex was a feat, given that fewer than fifteen had been unearthed. The Sacrison twins, who lived in the tiny town of Buffalo, had grown up near fossil beds and were taken with the hunt. They had learned that it was smart to search after a big storm or a spring thaw because weather and erosion unwrap gifts of bone. They had familiarized themselves with geology, knowing it’s as pointless to search for mastodon in rock formations 100 million years old as it is to look for Vulcanodon in sediments laid down during the Pleistocene.

  Another name to remember is Kathy Wankel. When the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) unveils its new hall of dinosaurs in 2019, after a five-year, $48 million renovation, it will feature, for the first time, its own Tyrannosaurus rex, courtesy of Wankel, a Montana rancher who in 1988 found the skeleton now known as “The Nation’s T. rex.” The specimen is considered important partly because it includes the first complete T. rex forelimb known to science.

  Despite amateurs’ contributions, science and commerce developed stark opposing arguments:

  Commerce: overregulation destroys the public’s interest in the natural world.

  Science: commodification compromises our evolving understanding of the planet.

  Commerce: science doesn’t need hundreds or even dozens of specimens of one species.

  Science: multiple specimens elucidate an organism and its environment over time.

  Commerce: private collectors wind up donating their stuff to museums anyway.

  Science: specimens collected under nonscientific conditions are worthless to research.

  Commerce: most museum fossils land in storage, never to be studied.

  Science: stored fossils have generated profound advances decades after their discovery.

  Commerce: scientists are stingy and elitist, with their snooty PhDs.

  Science: commercial hunters are destructive and greedy.

  Such were the contours of a seemingly intractable conflict. “Whether or not it’s okay to sell and buy fossils is a matter of debate on scientific and ethical grounds, with analytical rigor and professional honesty squaring off against free enterprise,” the paleontologists Kenshu Shimada and Philip Currie and their colleagues wrote in Palaeontologia Electronica. They called “the battle against heightened commercialization” of fossils “the greatest challenge to paleontology of the 21st century.”

  On both sides, the disagreement struck people as a shame, because scientists and commercial hunters at least were united in their love of one thing: fossils. If only more people would take a sincere interest in “rocks that can talk to you,” the paleobotanist Kirk Johnson, head of the Smithsonian’s NMNH, once told me. “The fact that our planet buries its dead is an amazing thing. The fact that you can read the history of the planet in fossils is profoundly cool. A smart kid can find a fossil and tell you what happened to the planet 4 billion years ago. We finally figured out how the planet works, and we did it through fossils.”

  If the confessed dinosaur thief Nate Murphy became an emblem of the tension between science and commerce, he didn’t reign for long. In the spring of 2012, a case emerged that surpassed all others in its international scope and labyrinthine particulars, touching on collectors, smuggling, marriage, democracy, poverty, artistry, museums, mining, Hollywood, Russia, China, criminal justice, presidential politics, explorers, Mongolian culture, the auction industry, and the history of science. This book is that untold story.

  CHAPTER 1

  “SUPERB TYRANNOSAURUS SKELETON”

  ON THE LAST DAY OF HIS OLD LIFE, THE DINOSAUR HUNTER went to the beach. This was Florida—Atlantic side, not Gulf. An overcast Sunday morning: the twentieth day of the fifth month of the two thousand and twelfth year CE. Eric Prokopi was thirty-eight. His daughter, Rivers, was turning three. Eric and his wife, Amanda, lugged a carload of party gear from their home in Gainesville across the upper peninsula, to St. Augustine, a sixteenth-century city named for a fourth-century theologian who, as a boy, stole pears off a tree simply because it was forbidden, later writing, “Foul was the evil and I loved it.”

  The Prokopis drove straight onto the foreshore, as is done in that town, and set up on the sand. The previous year’s party theme had been Pirates & Princesses. Eric, a tall, muscular ex-swimmer, had dressed in a frilly pink frock and tiara, accessorized with the black wraparound sunglasses of a mercenary. This year’s theme was Little Mermaid. Invitations pictured the birthday girl, a brown-eyed towhead with a heart-shaped face, wearing a finned tail and a platinum wig whose synthetic waves cascaded down her back. Now she had on a shimmering green skirt and a purple plastic crown, to which Amanda had affixed a dried starfish from the burgeoning inventory of her new interior decorating business, Everything Earth. Rivers’s brother, Greyson, two years older, wore a long-sleeved black swim shirt printed with the outline of a great white shark, and wraparound shades like his dad’s. All the essential elements were soon in place: tent, tables, sunscreen, cupcakes. A clear-acrylic cooler dispensed cerulean Hawaiian Punch. A watermelon, cut in the shape of an open-mouthed shark, offered a gullet full of gummy fish that glowed like sunlit rubies.

  Every few minutes, Eric stepped away to pace the sand with his Blackberry to his ear, increasingly anxious about the news from New York. He should have felt relaxed by the break of the surf and the opportunity to search the shoreline for washed-up treasure, as he had loved to do since childhood, but to be distracted and stressed was to miss these pleasures even while enacting them.

  The competing tensions, years in accrual, were beginning to show on his body. His eyes, brown as acorns, were bracketed by deepening crow’s-feet. His right eye had developed an inflamed twitch. His dark hair sprouted silver like crabgrass after a dense rain.
His enormous hands—bratwurst fingers, saucer palms—were callused and nicked. Amanda told friends that Eric worked so hard, she practically had to prop him up to make him eat. The kids barely saw him anymore. Until recently he had never been a drinker, but now he needed the dulling effect of at least one vodka cocktail before he could sleep. When working on big projects he might come to bed at four in the morning or not all.

  Late at night, Amanda could step to a rear window of their house, Serenola, and look out at the huge prefabricated workshop they had recently installed in the backyard—the recent shift in Eric’s vocation required more space. The shop, 5,000 square feet, with four bays and a pitched roof, stood beyond the swimming pool where the elegant landscaping gave way to the wild rear acres of the property, in a part of southwest Gainesville that developers hadn’t yet managed to ruin. Without close neighbors, Eric could work as noisily and late as necessary, the night vibrating with the high whine of his air scribe. Well into the hours of ambient frog song, Amanda could see the lights burning, sparks shooting off the welder.

  Eric’s company was called Florida Fossils. He hunted, restored, bought, and sold the remains of prehistoric creatures, mostly shark teeth and Ice Age mammals like giant ground sloths. Several times a year he hosted a sales booth at the world’s largest natural history shows—Tucson, Denver, Munich—and also attended ones like Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, France. Otherwise he sold fossils by email blast and on eBay, or to private clients. Amanda described the lifestyle to her skeptical mother as feast or famine: “Before a big piece sells, it’s famine. Then you sell it, and it’s feast; you pay all your people and you pay your bills, and you have money left over to reinvest. It’s no different from buying property to develop.”

  Recently, the trade had opened up in a way that natural history dealers found promising and paleontologists found troubling. Venerable fine-art auction houses now offered fossils with the kind of upscale presentation afforded old master paintings or Chippendale desks. The auctions often attracted overseas museums as buyers, along with private collectors who realized they could own the kind of specimens found in institutions like the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, or the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A collector with enough disposable income and square footage could more or less start his or her own museum.

  The most popular collectibles were the ones you could put on a shelf as a conversation piece, like meteorites and mammal skulls. Dinosaurs transcended everything, though. Dinosaurs fascinated children and adults alike for their size and variety alone: fleet little deadly winged carnivores capable of taking down beasts twice their size; peace-loving, plant-eating behemoths; apex predators that ravaged their way to the top of the food chain. Dinosaurs claimed universal name recognition: Tyrannosaurus rex is the one species whose name everyone gets right, the vertebrate paleontologist Thomas Holtz liked to say. Dinosaurs symbolized both catastrophic death and robust life: by human standards, they were far more successful. Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 166 million years, fell to a mass die-off, then enjoyed a cultural comeback—66 million years later. (Almost all of them went extinct, that is; we’ve still got birds.) “Dinosaurs are the gateway to science, which is the gateway to technology, which is the gateway to the future,” the paleobotanist Kirk Johnson, head of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, once said. A kid who spends her childhood engrossed in Stegosaurus might grow up to study oceans, algorithms, epidemics, algae, volcanoes, black holes, bacteria, bees, brains, sex, weather, sleep. “Seriously, if we don’t start thinking about how we view this planet from a science-and-tech standpoint, we’re cooked,” he said. “The fact that we can’t have a science debate with the presidential debate, and the fact that half the people in this country think the earth is only six thousand years old and that dinosaur bones are a hoax—it’s tied to the fact that we have crap science education. And you don’t take science education unless certain things interest you. And it just so happens that all kids care about dinosaurs.”

  Eric’s casual interest in dinosaurs started in childhood, but lately he’d incorporated them into his business. He had sold two enormous tyrannosaurid skulls back to back, both to major movie stars, for more money than he’d ever made, at one time, in his life. The sales suggested that he had found a thread of the trade that might provide for his family for years to come. As he celebrated his daughter’s birthday at the beach, he had a whole skeleton on offer in Manhattan, expected to fetch millions of dollars through Heritage Auctions, a company based in Dallas.

  The skeleton was that of Tarbosaurus bataar, or T. bataar (buh-TAR), the Asian cousin and near twin of Tyrannosaurus rex, the most famous creature that ever existed. Both lived in the late Cretaceous period, over 65 million years ago. This particular animal never reached maturity yet stood 8 feet tall and 24 feet long when it died. Its bite was devastating, if it matched that of T. rex, whose prey’s bones “likely exploded.” Over millennia the remains of this particular T. bataar had mineralized to a distinctively lovely shade of sand. Eric had consigned the skeleton to Heritage with a business partner, Chris Moore, a veteran fossil hunter who lived on the Jurassic Coast of England. The sale had been advertised and featured in the news for weeks. “SUPERB TYRANNOSAURUS SKELETON,” read the description in Heritage’s catalog, referring to the species’s original, sexier taxonomic classification. Prospective bidders could see the front end of the dinosaur on the back cover of the catalog, then open to page 92, unfurl the centerfold, and take in the whole skeleton, which stood elegantly lit against a deep-blue background. T. bataar “ruled” the “ancient floodplains that are today’s Gobi Desert,” read the sales text. The “incredible, complete skeleton” had been “painstakingly excavated and prepared.” The teeth were a “warm, woody brown.” The dinosaur was simply “delightful.”

  While Eric knew that paleontologists considered commercial fossil dealers like him venal and destructive—and in this case, it would be revealed, criminal—he had creation, not devastation, in mind. He was in it for the pleasure of hunting—and, yes, for the pleasure of a livelihood—yet also saw himself as a valuable part of the long tradition of preserving prehistory. Like every other commercial hunter, he felt he was salvaging materials that otherwise would weather out once they met air. The real crime, in his opinion, was letting fossils go to waste. His mounts from the Pleistocene epoch, the most recent ice age, stood in natural history museums from Charleston to Shanghai, and he envisioned spending the rest of his life making more finds worthy of museums. Even before he met Amanda, Eric had imagined getting married, having children, and one day taking his family on a sort of international tour of his reconstructions: standing before a looming skeleton, he would explain to his kids how the animal’s remains had lain entombed for many millions of years longer than humans could fathom, and how the forces of erosion and civilization continually pushed fossils to the earth’s surface. To him, self-referential talk sounded like showing off, but, if asked, he would explain how he had prepared the bones before reassembling and mounting them like a 3-D puzzle, standing the creature on its feet again for the first time since it last breathed.

  Heritage estimated the T. bataar would fetch between $950,000 and $1.5 million, though Eric and the auctioneers suspected it would sell for more. Such a large, fine tyrannosaurid hadn’t been to auction since 1997, when Tyrannosaurus Sue, a magnificent South Dakota T. rex, sold for $8.36 million via Sotheby’s. A major sale would generate enough income to pull Eric out of a quicksand of his own making, and until roughly seventy-two hours earlier, nothing had appeared to stand in his way.

  Earlier in the week, Bolortsetseg Minjin was having lunch near the American Museum of Natural History, on the Upper West Side of New York, when she overheard a news broadcast about the auction. A Mongolian paleontologist in her early forties, Bolor had spent most of her adult life in the United States. She lived in Port Washington, on the north shore of Long Island, with her American husband and their young daughter, whose name was the Mo
ngolian word for “rainbow.”

  Bolor stood five feet one-ish, though who really knew; she resisted talking in many specifics about herself. Her hair was a shiny black bob. On formal occasions she wore makeup and a bright silk deel—the traditional Mongolian tunic, a sash at the waist—but usually preferred casual clothes like jeans or capris and Merrell trekkers, with T-shirts that acclaimed girls in science and slogans like “Life Is Good.” Her pendant earrings were simple azure stones, a color that in Mongolia symbolizes the eternal blue sky. Friendly but wary, Bolor spoke in a low, measured voice, her dark eyes narrowing when she was suspicious and crinkling at the corners when she smiled. Her English, in which she had become fluent after arriving in America, was excellent and softly accented—Wee-oh-ming for Wyoming, gommint for government.

  Bolor grew up in 1970s Ulaanbaatar, aka “UB,” the capital of Mongolia, in the north-central part of the country. She came of age in the ’80s, in the last days of the country’s long run as a Soviet satellite state. She lived with her parents and siblings in an apartment complex west of Sukhbaatar Square, the city’s main plaza, home to the imposing Government House and the crypts and statues of Communist heroes. Her father, Chuluun Minjin, a geologist who had trained in Russia like his peers, taught paleontology at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology (MUST) and worked on fossil invertebrates. As a child, Bolor wasn’t allowed on his Gobi Desert expeditions—going out in the field was man’s work, her mother told her—but she looked forward to seeing the rocks her dad brought home in his backpack. One day he showed her a piece of coral. Corals are marine life, and it fascinated Bolor to think of her vast country, landlocked between the gargantuan nations of Russia to the north and China everywhere else, as the onetime home of a sea.