The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  The Gobi’s most stunning creatures were the dinosaurs that had lived in the area in diverse abundance and whose remains lay preserved with unusual clarity in the largely undisturbed desert. Bolor knew about them only because her father had told her. Western kids had plenty of access to information about dinosaurs: American children in particular could participate in museum-supervised digs, watch fossil preparators work in museum labs, enjoy interactive exhibits, join nature clubs, and then go home and lose themselves in dinosaur toys, books, puzzles, and TV shows. At places like Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, they could see more than a thousand Jurassic bones still embedded in the protected cliff face of a former Carnegie Museum of Natural History quarry. On the trails at Badlands National Park in South Dakota, they could see the remains of late Eocene and Oligocene mammals poking right out of the dirt. But despite Mongolia’s importance as “the largest dinosaur fossil reservoir in the world,” paleontology was, as Bolor put it, “no place for kids.” Once you left the forlorn Natural History Museum in downtown Ulaanbaatar, there was “basically no source of information where you can learn more about these exciting, interesting animals.”

  On Bolor’s birthday her father liked to entertain her and her friends with slideshows about dinosaurs, and in his classroom he allowed her to examine the plastic models and fossils he used to teach paleontology. Later, as Bolor pursued a geology degree at MUST, her father formally became her professor and then her graduate adviser. When she decided to work on vertebrates he told her, “Oh, it’s so hard to do vertebrates—you have to know anatomy.” Bolor committed to invertebrates, but found someone to tutor her in vertebrate anatomy anyway. She was still in school in 1990 when the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) returned to the Gobi after over sixty years of banishment. Minjin, as everyone called Bolor’s dad, signed on to the museum’s historic joint expedition with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. When he asked the Mongolian side’s leaders for a spot for his daughter, they said she could come if she could cook. Bolor couldn’t boil water; but she accepted. Then, once in the field, she spent her time hunting fossils, telling the others, “I’m a paleontologist. I’m supposed to be doing whatever it is the paleontologists are doing.”

  The AMNH connection led to a short-term slot as a visiting scientist in the museum’s department of vertebrate paleontology. Bolor’s first view of America was New York: she moved from a vast country of barely two million people to a dense city of over seven million. After finishing her master’s degree in Mongolia in 1997, she returned to Manhattan to pursue a PhD in the joint AMNH program with the City University of New York, becoming the first Mongolian paleontologist educated in the West.

  By now, in the late spring of 2012, Bolor had been out of school for years, working on her own projects. Her advanced training was in multituberculates, the wee mammals that lived in the cracks and shadows of the late Cretaceous and survived the fifth extinction, but her other interest was dinosaurs. It amazed her that some of paleontology’s most glorious discoveries had been made in Mongolia yet even the nomads who lived within walking distance of the Gobi bone beds had no idea. Bolor could walk down the street in Ulaanbaatar and not meet five people who could name a single Mongolian dinosaur—not Velociraptor, Oviraptor, Protoceratops, Psittacosaurus, Alioramus, or Therizinosaurus. For years, she had been trying to raise awareness in her country and beyond of the importance of Gobi fossils. She wanted to draw more of Mongolia’s most promising students toward paleontology instead of the usual choices, like engineering or mining. Mongolian paleontologists should be leading the way on research involving Mongolian materials, she liked to say; in her opinion, Mongolian paleontologists ceded too much authority to foreign scientists who had built their careers on Gobi fossils and given too little in return.

  Lately, she had been worried about poachers, who had been hitting Gobi dinosaur sites with increasing frequency. The difference between a fossil poacher and a fossil hunter is the same as the difference between a poacher and a hunter of wildlife—one respects boundaries, and the other doesn’t. A wildlife poacher may take twice as many deer as the law allows; a fossil poacher may take bones from lands where private collection is forbidden, like federal property in the United States, or countries that ban the trade. Modern thieves go after fossils using tools as basic as a shovel and as high-tech as helicopters and Google Earth. Geology and geography altogether provide favorable conditions: dinosaurs tend to be found in vast, remote, underpopulated, undeveloped places like badlands and deserts, which are difficult to police. Poachers count on the fact that a fossil’s origin becomes nearly impossible to trace once it’s collected—until scientists perfect matchmaking technology for trace earth elements, it’s unlikely that anyone will be able to connect a fossil to a particular hole in the ground with unimpeachable certainty. Mongolian law forbids the trade: by law, fossils are the property of the state. Yet illicit Gobi Desert dinosaurs were being sold on the open market. The paleontologist Philip Currie, Canada’s eminent tyrannosaur expert and then president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, had started documenting the number of savaged T. bataar sites alone and had counted nearly a hundred since 2000.

  Bolor had been trying to get Mongolian government leaders to do something about dinosaur poaching, but politicians couldn’t have been less interested. Recently, though, she had made an ally, Oyungerel “Oyuna” Tsedevdamba, a women’s rights activist and aide to President Tsakhia Elbegdorj, who was finishing his first term in office. On the day that Bolor overheard the news about the Heritage auction, she listened closely. “Tyrannosaur” was a North American species, but “bataar”—that was her language. The word meant “hero.” Convinced that Heritage was selling a black-market Mongolian dinosaur, Bolor emailed Oyuna.

  Thursday night in New York is Friday morning in Ulaanbaatar, a city of 1.2 million people. Oyuna was getting ready for work at her townhouse in Zaisan, an upscale district south of the city center. She had been busy recruiting women to run for public office—the election for parliament was weeks away—and was just about to check her email when her husband, Jeffrey Falt, a semiretired American lawyer, sprinted downstairs in his bathrobe to tell Oyuna about the auction he’d just read about online. Bolor’s email underscored the urgency. Oyuna wrote her, Do everything you can to stop the auction, and suggested that Bolor and other paleontologists contact Heritage with questions: Who was the seller? How had the dinosaur been acquired? Bolor was already on it, having quickly emailed a former AMNH colleague, Dr. Mark Norell.

  Norell, a vertebrate paleontologist in his mid-fifties, was busy packing for the Gobi. Compact and wiry, with distinctive round eyeglasses and wild, silver hair, he wore skinny khakis and dark linen shirts and, on his right wrist, several slender silver bracelets. He looked like he ought to be slinging a Fender Stratocaster instead of a geologic hammer.

  Norell grew up in Los Angeles, where his elementary school had allowed him to substitute science class with weekend visits to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Despite career flirtations with molecular biology and law school, he ultimately pursued paleontology, though he considered the discipline a bit “lightweight,” once explaining, “There’s no mathematics, there’s no proofs, there’s no empiricism at all.” Happily, that was changing. “We approach things more empirically than before,” he said. “It’s much more biological.”

  Norell didn’t like dinosaurs as an animal—a lot of paleontologists don’t. Yet he liked dinosaur science. To him, being a scientist was all about asking the right questions. He liked thinking about the creativity of science, about “how we come up with ideas.” Hired at the American Museum of Natural History in August 1989, he was in the Gobi Desert by the summer of 1990, helping lead the first U.S. team allowed passage since the 1920s.

  Now Norell was the chairman and curator of the museum’s paleontology division. He had returned to Mongolia every summer except for the year his daughter was born. His crew was known to “go feral” out there
, spending shower-free weeks hunting and excavating fossils all day and relaxing at night, enjoying the excellent food, beer, and wine they’d brought in bulk. Norell remembered an early tag-along journalist who imagined such an expedition would be good for him. He’d lose weight! Quit smoking! He’d spend serene lantern-lit nights reading in his tent. The experience turned out to be more akin to “touring with the Stones.” Norell knew it was “important to have a good time.” Such a good time, in fact, that he usually stopped in Beijing on his way home for a total-body exfoliation. Just recently, doctors had found an old beer-can tab stuck in his throat, accumulating scar tissue.

  When not in the field Norell worked out of a light-infused museum office at the top of the granite turret that had overlooked Central Park since the late 1800s. The spiritual centerpiece of his lofty space was an antique desk that had once belonged to Barnum Brown, the discoverer of T. rex. Otherwise there were iMacs and fresh orchids, and, currently, half-packed duffel bags containing packages of quinoa earmarked for the Gobi. Curatorial cabinets held small, fine-boned Mongolian and Chinese skeletons Norell had been studying in his decades-long effort to better understand feathered dinosaurs. These were the kinds of bones that had been showing up on the commercial market, even though it was illegal to buy and sell fossils in both countries. Poachers were “clobbering” dinosaur sites in the Gobi, which straddles the Mongolia–China border. Materials often turned up online and at Tucson, the sprawling gem, mineral, and fossil show that, for two weeks every February, attracts an influx of fifty-five thousand people. Norell admired collectors’ enthusiasm as long as they honored boundaries, and most of them did. “I’m not one of the people who are of the opinion that only scientists are entitled to fossils—there are a lot of legitimate, conscientious dealers out there,” he once said. “My big thing is, you need to obey the laws, as far as what can be trafficked country to country.” But international regulations varied widely, shifted often, and were usually unavailable in English, and certain hunters took advantage of the confusion by exploiting the legally untested gray areas; they had created “almost a Silk Road of dinosaur-dealing.”

  Best he could, Norell kept an eye on the trade. Auction catalogs piled up in his office, and he regularly attended the Tucson show, where dealers might sell dubious fossils in back rooms or right out in the open. Walking around, he could tell instantly which materials were hot. Dinosaur bones from Argentina were, by definition, hot. Chinese dinosaurs, hot. Brazil, hot. A lot of Moroccan stuff, also hot. In Canada, fossil vertebrates belonged to the crown, so if you saw, say, Gorgosaurus bones from the Red Deer badlands of Alberta: hot.

  If there was one country’s fossil laws Norell knew better than most, it was Mongolia’s, after having spent so much of his career there. So when he saw Heritage offering the T. bataar skeleton, he clocked the specimen’s illegitimacy with a glance.

  Individual Gobi bones and skulls had long been sold at market, to paleontologists’ impotent fury, but Norell had never seen anyone with the audacity to put up a large, mounted, museum-quality skeleton. At least four other items in the Heritage lineup appeared to be Mongolian, too, including the skull of Saichania, a hulking late Cretaceous herbivore with a tail-club and an armored head that, in fossil form, resembled an ornamental mask. The sales descriptions included direct references to the Gobi and vague ones to “Central Asia,” which, in the dodgier quarters of the fossil trade, was often code for China and Mongolia. Now, in his letter to Heritage, Norell asserted the T. bataar and Saichania specimens “were clearly excavated in Mongolia as this is the only locality in the world where these dinosaurs are known.” He added, “There is no legal mechanism (nor has there been for over 50 years) to remove vertebrate fossil material from Mongolia. These specimens are the patrimony of the Mongolian people and should be in a museum in Mongolia.” In her own letter, Bolor Minjin wrote, “The auctioning of such specimens fuels the illegal fossil trade and must be stopped.” Politely, she asked how Heritage, a thirty-six-year-old company founded by a pair of rare-coin collectors, happened to have acquired a Mongolian dinosaur in the first place.

  The species name was clue enough that the skeleton was Mongolian, but the bones themselves were the best evidence. To be sure of their facts, Norell and Bolor went to the auction preview to see the specimen in person.

  The auction was scheduled for two p.m. Sunday, on West 22nd Street in Chelsea, in a converted warehouse formerly occupied by the Dia Art Foundation, an organization created in the 1970s to help artists produce projects that “might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope.” Scale and scope were what Norell and Bolor found. A space that once showcased work by modernists now held nearly two hundred objects billions of years in the making. The minerals and gemstones glowed flamingo pink, canary yellow, Prince purple. Rare quartzes and crystals resembled wayward Lord of the Rings props. A pair of insects in amber told a beautiful story of terrible timing: the bugs died in coitus, forever captured in fossil tree resin, a preservative so clear and golden the couple appeared to be floating in hardened honey or a nice autumnal ale. Each lot wasn’t just fascinating to look at; it represented a moment in planetary history and geological process. A “boulder” of gold signified molten rock that flowed, cooled, solidified. A giant frond and stingray, imprinted in limestone, showed that palm trees and sea creatures existed some 50 million years ago in what is now Wyoming. The descriptions borrowed from the scientific lexicon, their curious names evoking a cross between hard-candy confections and bicycle parts—rutilated quartz, fluorescent scheelite, spinel twin. David Herskowitz, the natural history broker who had organized this, Heritage’s first auction dedicated exclusively to natural history, had curated the pieces himself.

  The most arresting sight in the showroom loomed behind security ropes: Lot 49135, the “crown jewel,” T. bataar. With its arms out and its jaws open, the dinosaur appeared to be hunting the cast Komodo dragon crouching nearby, on blue velvet. Norell, who had spent two decades working in the only area known to produce significant T. bataar remains, confirmed the dinosaur as Mongolian.

  Meanwhile in Mongolia, Oyuna contacted a friend in Connecticut who now spread the word about the bataar sale. News articles appeared online. A paleontologist in California started an internet petition, which quickly collected nearly two thousand signatures and comments: “Mongolian fossils are spectacular… selling them as mantelpieces is akin to using the Mona Lisa as a placemat.” “Actions like this only serve to increase an air of mistrust in the scientific community, which needs to unite globally now more than ever.” “This is bad for science, politics, and the world.” Yet Heritage wasn’t yielding. The company’s attorney in New York responded to Bolor’s letter, saying that in their opinion, “no impropriety exists”—Heritage had no reason to believe U.S. law had been broken, and the company was “unaware that Mongolian law would have prevented export from Mongolia.” Besides, the letter added, “Mongolia won its independence in 1921 and this specimen is quite a bit older than that.”

  Bolor found the response ludicrous. She told Oyuna, “We need a lawyer.”

  The auction went forward as planned. Forty-eight seconds of bidding yielded a hammer price of $1,052,500, an impending payout that Eric Prokopi desperately needed to pocket. On the beach in St. Augustine, he hung up the phone filled with unease, and feeling a very long way from where all of this had started.

  CHAPTER 2

  LAND O’ LAKES

  FLORIDA IS FLAT AND RATHER FEATURELESS COMPARED TO other states, but what it lacks in topographical drama, it makes up for in fluids. The Everglades have been called both a river of grass and a prairie of water. Nearly eight thousand lakes have a surface area of at least ten acres. There are 11,000 miles of streams, rivers, and waterways; over 2,000 miles of tidal shoreline; and more major springs than anywhere else in the country. A Floridian who doesn’t go into the drink is a Himalayan who doesn’t climb.

  To this waterland came a young German named Dorothea “Doris”
Trappe, daughter of Cologne, a trading port on the Rhine. Her father, a mechanic, owned a “big, big, big, big, big, big” boat then lost it in an accident. In May 1940, when Doris was four, the Allied bombs of World War II began falling on the city. Tens of thousands of people fled over the next five years, including Doris’s family, who returned after the war minus one: Doris’s older sister died of diphtheria on the journey home.

  Cologne was destroyed. The family lived in half a house. Doris’s dad got a job rebuilding the city but had a heart attack and died. Doris eventually followed a boyfriend to New York and then to Florida and married him, making her home in a place that had always “represented the middle-class dream of a place” where “you could find health and warmth and leisure,” as Susan Orlean put it in The Orchid Thief. “Florida wasn’t grimy or industrial or hidebound or ingrown….It was luscious and fruitful. It felt new and it looked new, with all its newly minted land and all the billboards pointing to new developments and the bright new sand that had been dredged up and added to the beach. Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world—a fresh, free, unspoiled start.”