The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  Construction, road building, and mining were churning earth nationwide. Natural history clubs were popping up in every state. Frank began writing a column called “Fossil Facts and Philosophy” for the newsletter of the Tampa Bay Mineral and Science Club. Organizations and teachers invited him to give presentations and lectures. “Did you learn about fossils in college?” a student sometimes asked. Frank had gone to the navy, not college, but he came up with an answer that satisfied him: he had learned about fossils as a student of the natural world.

  Frank was made a Smithsonian “field associate” after finding the extraordinary skull of a baleen whale and donating it to the museum. The honorary title recognized what one scientist called his “heroic” volume of collecting. Daryl Domning, a Howard University anatomist and Smithsonian affiliate, shared one of his National Science Foundation grants with Frank, to study dugongs. By now Frank had self-published a self-illustrated book about Florida fossils, Illustrated Guide to Fossil Vertebrates, but the Smithsonian’s recognition was what floored him. He had never been so proud of anything in his life. When he received the official letter, he sat on his doorstep and cried at the thought of being a thirty-three-year-old pipe insulator with a high school diploma, acknowledged by one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions.

  On June 27, 1983, a rainy Monday, Frank drove to Ruskin, to one of his favorite hunting spots, a former tomato field now being quarried for crushed seashells. He often prospected there with the permission of the landowners, a family company called the Leisey Shell Corporation. He had once found an elephant skull on the property by following the fossil signature of a stream bed, and ever since then he had been checking the draglines, expecting more bones to surface.

  A new cut had opened up several days earlier and the dragline operator had immediately gone on vacation. The whole mine had knocked off for the day by the time Frank wandered into the pit. Surrounded by high banks, he looked up to see fossils the likes of which he would not have thought possible. They jutted like wayward tree roots from a bed 2 feet thick and 60 feet long. The earthen wall so bristled with bone it was like looking at an earth sandwich, overstuffed with body parts.

  After some joyful sobbing he phoned David Webb at the FMNH, only to learn that the museum wasn’t interested in the Leisey shell pit. No problemo, Frank said. He rounded up a bunch of friends from the insulation business and started an independent excavation.

  Every day, the crew took photos and measurements as they worked, documenting the dig. Frank sketched the finds to scale. His brother-in-law, Mickey, a long-haired, big-bearded insulation installer, brought in an RV so they could guard the pit 24/7, and tracked each day’s assignments, often wearing little more than a Speedo. The shell pit’s surface temperature could reach 140 degrees and the mosquitoes were the size of wasps, but nearly two hundred volunteers, many from local fossil clubs, showed up to help. Frank already knew he was onto something important. As the bootleg crew broke for Fourth of July picnicking, he climbed a spoil and planted an American flag.

  The Leisey pocket produced bones one million to two million years old, representing 140 species, dozens of them previously unknown to science. The site yielded a hodgepodge of legs, ribs, skulls, vertebrae, tusks, arms, teeth, and claws, as if carcasses had piled up in a flood—bits of cheetah, jaguar, llama, bear, monk seal, shark, wrasse, snook, turtle, flamingo, and toad. The extinct creatures included the cotton rat, a condor with a wingspan of over 11 feet, and a rare gomphothere. A giant armadillo stood 4 feet tall, a beaver nearly 8, a ground sloth nearly 20. The temporary population of Ruskin seemed to triple in the weeks that followed. The FMNH eventually launched a formal dig, becoming the fossils’ repository. At that point, Webb was calling the discovery “extremely significant,” saying, “This is like finding a new chapter in the history of life.”

  Frank had discovered the richest Pleistocene fossil bed in all of North America, and volunteers had helped get the bones out. Euphoric, he went live on NBC’s Today show, beaming in from a Florida studio to chat with the host, Bryant Gumbel. Wearing white jeans, big hair, and an orange patterned shirt, he sat next to a small table that held a sloth claw and other fossils he’d brought along as props. “You’ve been offered a great deal of money, I’m told, for your fossils, but you’ve chosen to donate them to science rather than sell them,” Gumbel said. “Why?”

  “Because they belong to the people of Florida,” Frank said, smiling nervously.

  “You have no formal training in paleontology,” Gumbel said. “Why have you pursued it?”

  Frank explained that he’d rather not spend his life in an air-conditioned building. “I like going out to the field and discovering. That’s exciting.”

  “What about scientists who’ve now taken a look at what you’ve come up with and have marveled at it?” Gumbel said. “Are they—this may sound kind of strange—are they accepting you as an equal or are they just looking at you as some kind of an amateur who got lucky?”

  It was an interesting question. Frank had donated hundreds of finds to museums. The Smithsonian had awarded him a grant. Scientists had named species after him. Frank had added at least five type specimens to the fossil record—meaning he’d found the holotype, or the first of a creature’s kind—including a bizarre, distant relative of camels that David Webb named Kyptoceras amatorum, honoring all amateur fossil hunters. The Smithsonian’s Clayton Ray thought of Frank as “an amateur in the best sense of the word. He’s a full pro when it comes to field work, but he just doesn’t make any money at it.” As Webb put it, “In twenty years he’s produced more than any other single human being active in Florida in the way of exciting new finds.”

  Frank told Bryant Gumbel, “No, I think they have respected me now.”

  “Huh,” Gumbel said. He wanted to know what Frank planned for an encore. “I mean, having done this you certainly can’t hope to top it.”

  Frank grinned and said, “Oh, yes, I probably can.”

  That summer, Frank was asked to help persuade state lawmakers to toughen the law concerning fossil collecting in Florida. The federal government was struggling with the question of how to protect the nation’s fossils, and various states were taking up the matter on their own. There are many more legitimate dealers out there than not, and as long as the law allows them to collect, they want to be taken seriously as professionals. In the late 1970s commercial hunters had formed a trade group, the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences (AAPS), eventually modeling their publication, the Journal of Paleontological Sciences (“Paleontology in the spirit of cooperation”), on esteemed scientific journals. Dealers gave their businesses scientific-sounding names. They established a code of ethics, which required AAPS members to obey all regulations, cooperate with agencies and institutions, and at least attempt to sell items of “unique scientific” interest to responsible buyers “for study, research, and preservation.” Collectors and hobbyists strolled the aisles of the organization’s fantastical fossil fairs and shopped online, many “unaware that the commercialization of fossils is even a problem,” Shimada, Currie, and their colleagues wrote. In the paleontologists’ view, the United States had a regulation problem, certain countries had a black-market problem, and paleontology overall had a PR problem. The public’s “misguided perceptions” about fossils not only hindered scientists’ ability to conduct academic research but also imperiled their efforts to secure funding and keep their jobs. And the rising commercial value of fossils led to poaching. Paleontologists were increasingly lobbying the U.S. government to make fossils altogether off-limits to commercial hunters. Other fossil-rich nations already outright banned the private ownership and sale of paleontological resources, but the United States struggled to decide how to fairly handle objects that served as the foundation of a science, a trade, and a hobby, the latter of which connected millions of people to the natural world in an increasingly sedentary age of screens.

  Frank saw both sides of the tension be
tween paleontologists and commercial hunters, but he testified before the Florida Senate in favor of requiring amateurs to purchase an annual $5 collection permit and report any unusual or potentially significant finds; the state would then decide who kept them. The proposition vaguely echoed the law in England, except that in England the crown either bought hunters’ fossils or allowed them to be sold elsewhere if scientists didn’t want them. The Florida legislation provided no such provision. To hunters it didn’t seem fair that they’d spend time and money finding something great and not be reimbursed for their efforts. Many considered the regulatory attempts a threat to their favorite pastime and livelihood, and were so furious that Frank claimed he got death threats.

  The legislation passed. Frank carried on, ablaze with new purpose. He won an award once given to the famous shipwreck explorer Mel Fisher, drank Singapore slings with the pro wrestler Dusty Rhodes, and founded the Tampa Bay Fossil Club. When invited to speak at colleges he turned what was supposed to be a paleontology talk into a dazzling, if baffling, motivational lecture. “Attitude—it’s all about attitude!” he told students at schools like Yale.

  The insulation business was not big enough to hold him. He announced his plans to quit. Wait a month, and you’ll get a gold pin, the union told him.

  Gold or gold-plated? Frank asked.

  Plated, said the union.

  See ya, said Frank.

  Now pursuing fossils full time, he called himself a freelance paleontologist. He self-published a memoir, Sunrise at Bone Valley, with his fossil sketches in the back pages and himself on the soft cover, in an “I Dig Fossils” T-shirt, posing beside the semi-interred rib cage of a huge dugong. The book began, “Mystical, magical, wonderful, and exciting—these are just a few of the words I use to describe my life.” He taped himself singing “Besame Mucho,” one of his favorite songs, and eventually put it on YouTube. He won karaoke contests. He wrote a tune called “Corazon de Tampa” and lobbied politicians to declare it the city’s official song, at one point vowing to turn it into a Broadway musical. Instead, he worked on his second of three memoirs, I Don’t Have Time to Be Sane: The Life Story of One of the Most Notorious Fossil Hunters in America. The cover showed Frank in a white-tie tuxedo and pearl earring, playing, like a piano, the ribs of that same dugong. The preface, written by the president of the Delaware Paleontological Society, read, “Imagine a character composed of (Forrest) Gump, Pied Piper, Rocky Balboa, Indiana Jones, and Norman Vincent Peale—add some hot sauce and you’ve got Frank.”

  Some admired Frank’s confidence; others thought Frank was way too full of Frank. Frank didn’t care. “His lectures are always educational and entertaining, and generally result in ‘Standing Room Only,’” read Frank’s bio, written by Frank. His goal was to convey one exuberant message: “You are never too old, too weak, too sick, too poor, too tied down, too far away—too anything—to discover and learn.”

  Collectors continually offload their fossils, whether to make bank or to make room for more. And so it was that Frank announced that he’d sold part of his personal stash to a phosphate company, which in turn donated it to Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry. Other hunters from other states were well known in the trade—the Larson brothers in South Dakota, Mike Triebold in Colorado, Henry Galiano in New York, Tom Lindgren in Utah, the Ulrich family in Wyoming—but Frank was the face of Florida.

  Among his protégés was the kid from Land O’ Lakes, Eric Prokopi.

  CHAPTER 4

  DIVE

  THE LEISEY SHELL PIT FLANKED A SUN-BEATEN TWO-LANER called Agricola. Parked cars lined the road almost from the moment Frank Garcia brought in his band of volunteers. Shovels and sifting screens lay scattered among the spoils. Hunters planted golf umbrellas for shade. They drank out of coolers. Women worked in bikinis. A radio was always going. Brief, hard rains bathed the bone, raising a steamy mist. A medical professional stood by because the heat could drop you like a sniper, boy. Could anything be more irresistible to a kid?

  Every possible weekend, Eric and his mom drove to the Ice Age graveyard near Cockroach Bay, ninety minutes round trip. They joined the crowds, searching on foot and knee like everyone else, like every fossil hunter ever. Paleontologists are always asked how they find what they find, and they’re always saying, “Just look down.” Because for all of paleontology’s technological advances—3-D, digital data-sharing, photogrammetry, synchrotron-radiation tomography—fossil hunting remains an analog activity. It starts by walking around and paying attention, by looking for bits of earth that don’t quite match their surroundings. As the volunteers worked, Frank answered questions, a dagger hanging from his belt. “Is this anything?” they asked. “Is this anything?” is the fossil hunter’s refrain. The this might be the ear bone of a whale or a concretion, round as buckshot with a secret center: split neatly with the whack of a geological hammer, it may yield a nicely preserved prehistoric bug or other fantastical remains, depending on where in the world it was found. Then again, rock may simply be rock: Scraposaurus, junk, float, frag.

  Hunters like Frank seemed born with the ability to “see” fossils; others had to learn it, and some never learned it. Doris and Eric would take Bill hunting, and as their buckets overflowed, he’d find nothing. Doris had a good eye, but Eric’s was better. “He smells them,” she said. In fact, Doris thought Eric might have the Garcia gift.

  The remains of megafauna routinely appeared in the toothed scoops of construction backhoes, but also in water. The rivers beautifully preserved the state’s fossil record, which extends to 50 million years ago. Hunters reported wading into streams and discovering near-complete skeletons of giant sloths. Fossils were found in sinkholes, rivers, and quarries, and in the limestone caves that honeycombed the Panhandle. After high winds and heavy seas, hunters spotted bones among beached bunches of seaweed. Joe Larned, Frank Garcia’s mentor, once said he used to see so many fossils while canoeing down rivers that he and his friends would “just pick out whatever we wanted with the oars.” He said, “We wouldn’t even stop. If we saw a big tooth, we’d just reach out with the paddle like a baker with bread.”

  By now, Eric was diving. When he was ten, he had asked his mom to stop at the Land O’ Lakes Scuba Center, a cinder-block shop on the highway into town, with a dive flag hanging from a pole out front. The shop stocked fins, tanks, hoses, masks, floats, ropes, belts, lights, knives, all the tools a human needed in order to move between worlds.

  Doris had given birth to Eric in a Tampa hospital, but it was to the waters that he seemed born. He had been swimming since he was a small child, and swimming competitively since age seven. Diving interested him because he wanted to look at fish, but then a display cabinet drew his nose to the glass; inside lay objects larger and curiouser than shark teeth, such as enormous molars the color of fudge.

  You want those kinds of fossils, you’ll have to dive for them, the shopkeeper had told Eric.

  Their lessons had started with clear-water diving, Eric learning by repetition. Into the drink, backward or split-legged over the side of a boat. Breathe calmly. Come up slowly. Always dive with a partner. Don’t forget your dive float—you wanna get run over by a Bayliner? Then came river diving. You will see fish, snakes, turtles, antique bottles, arrowheads, tires, and train wheels. If you see an alligator, stay calm, but get out of there. You may see “sinker wood”—thousands of lumberjacked logs sank in the 1800s and early 1900s while being floated downriver to mills. Jam your hand blindly into mud and you might get cut, so don’t do that. To unearth a fossil, try not to touch the sediment at all: fan the water, letting physics do the work.

  Eric advanced to dark-water diving within two years, testing himself in rivers so murky that the observable world shrank to the primordial soup that swirled in the yellow beam of his headlamp. It was spooky and lonely down there, and took some getting used to. Different waters spoke different languages. Freshwater was largely silent but for the muffled drone of a motorboat. Salt water was symphon
ic with the crackle of shrimp. When Eric started venturing out on his own, Doris sat in the canoe, enjoying the sun. As he worked out of sight at the end of a tether, she waited between the gunwales, ready to tug the line at the first sight of an alligator.

  Fossils began piling up at the house on Grove Lane. Bill often showed Eric his stamp collection, still hoping to interest him in one of his hobbies. Eric had watched his dad spend hours at his desk by the living room window, cutting the stamps off old envelopes and organizing them into books. An interior life didn’t bother him, but an indoor life did.

  Yet Eric enjoyed his father’s fondness for maps. Every summer, before driving to Winnipeg to see the Canadian side of the family, Bill would get out his atlas and choose a new route north, through counties they hadn’t visited yet, highlighting each area in yellow as they went. Sometimes they stopped at a river so Eric could snorkel near a boat ramp and see what the currents had washed up.