The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  There wasn’t anything about fossils that he disliked. He enjoyed hunting them, cleaning them, identifying them, sorting them, and learning about them. He wrote newsletter articles describing certain creatures: “Order Proboscidea—the mastodons, stegodonts, gomphotheres, and elephants—was found on all continents except Australia and Antarctica…” As his collection threatened to take over the house, Eric rented a booth at the Bone Valley fossil fair in Lakeland and, with his parents’ help, unloaded hundreds of shark teeth and Ice Age bones, banking eight hundred dollars. The Prokopis started driving to trade shows as far away as Illinois, sometimes pocketing thousands of dollars at each event.

  Eric had started collecting shark jaws in order to learn about the different species and their teeth. One day, his mom heard about a shark-fishing tournament in Tarpon Springs and said, You shoult go get toes shocks and cut out toes jaws! Some collectors would pay $15,000 for a single mouth of a great white. Eric borrowed a pickup and he and Doris drove over to the tournament pier and found a dozen or so lemon, tiger, and nurse sharks strung up by their tails. The fishermen said Eric could have the carcasses provided he hauled them away, so he loaded the big fish into the bed of the truck and drove them to Land O’ Lakes. In the front yard, he cut them open, carving out the jaws. Each set of jaws went into an enormous Ziploc. Each Ziploc went into a garbage bag. Each garbage bag went into another garbage bag, then another. The bags went into Doris’s deep-freeze. Whenever he was ready to work with a set of jaws, Eric would scrape off the flesh, soak the jaws in peroxide, then insert a cylindrical object like a coffee can or bucket into the mouth to stretch the cartilage into an “O.” The average buyer prefers a pose an ocean swimmer might see just before he is eaten.

  In the classifieds he found a used fishing boat. His father had given him his old Mercury Sable. Now that Eric had his own transportation he could hunt whenever he wanted when he wasn’t in school or the swimming pool. Working several trade shows per year, he sometimes grossed more money than his father. His new business cards featured a sketch of a shark tooth and read—

  Florida Fossils

  Collector of Shark Teeth, Fossil Vertebrates, and all Florida Fossils

  Buy—Sell—Trade

  He stocked up on prep tools, eventually owning not just paintbrushes and toothbrushes and dental picks but also an electric scribe. He built a blast cabinet to clean denser materials without shrapneling himself with sprayed matrix. Some days he’d sit in the driveway in a lawn chair, working a fossil the way old men patiently whittled wood.

  In the fall of 1992, he started school at the University of Florida, having graduated third in his high school class. The university had awarded him grants and an academic scholarship based on his high SAT and ACT scores, and he paid his living expenses with fossil money. He had been swimming competitively for so long, he wanted to keep going, so he walked onto the swim team. One of the coaches told the press that Eric would need to work hard to earn a berth on such a competitive, successful squad, but said that what he lacked in natural talent he made up for with determination. “Eric is a very conscientious guy,” coach Peter Banks told the Tampa Tribune. “He may not seem all that outgoing in the pool—and that has to do with swimming alone—but he has a tremendous work ethic, with swimming and everything else.”

  The university had a strong paleontology program affiliated with the Florida Museum of Natural History there in Gainesville. Eric volunteered at the museum as part of his work-study obligation, but he didn’t enroll in any paleontology courses because he still largely thought of fossils as a fun hobby. From what he could tell, paleontologists, who worked for universities, museums, or the government, spent a lot of their time fighting bureaucracy and groveling for funding, and too little of it hunting. Eric majored in engineering science instead, to get a general knowledge of how things worked. Yet even a high-paying job in his concentration, coastal and oceanographic engineering, wouldn’t be worth the price of being bound to an office or kowtowing to a boss, he decided. He wanted a life as a hunter, no matter the risks.

  The risks were growing, but so were the potential commercial rewards, thanks to the case of Tyrannosaurus Sue.

  People who live near badlands live with the prospect of dinosaurs in their backyard. Mako sica, the Lakota Indians called such areas—“land bad.” The term used by Early French Canadian trappers was les mauvaises terres pour traverser—“bad lands to travel through.”

  Badlands are nothing more than the ruins of a former sea bed, but they are among nature’s finest art—a “very skeleton of nature, or the wreck of an embryonic world,” as scouts put it when surveying western U.S. territories for Congress in the mid-1850s. In searching for the best route to the Pacific, the government-dispatched surveyors, scientists, and artists described soil, climate, lumber, tunnels, fuel, snowfall, wildlife, harbors, good water, bad water, trading posts, trees, mosses, war parties, and “Women of great age.” One author might have been describing areas of either Montana or the Gobi Desert when writing, “From the uniform, monotonous open prairie, the traveller suddenly descends… into a valley that looks as if it sunk away from the surrounding world, leaving standing all over it thousands of abrupt, irregular, prismatic, and columnar masses, frequently capped with irregular pyramids…” The description went on—

  … [T]he traveller treads his way through deep, confined labyrinthine passages, not unlike the narrow, irregular streets and lanes of some quaint old town of the European continent. Viewed in the distance, indeed, these rocky piles, in their endless succession, assume the appearance of massive artificial structures, decked out with all the accessories of buttress and turret, arched doorway and clustered shaft, pinnacle, and finial and tapering spire. One might almost imagine oneself approaching some magnificent city of the dead, where the labor and genius of forgotten nations had left behind them a multitude of monuments of art and skill.

  In fact, one was approaching some magnificent city of the dead, for fossils were everywhere, remnants of the Western Interior Seaway, that vast body of water that bisected the continent for tens of millions of years. Fossils are more easily discovered in and around the old ghost sea because the sedimentary layers aren’t covered by kudzu or neighborhoods or malls.

  The Larson brothers, Peter and Neal, grew up in one such area of South Dakota in the 1950s and ’60s. By the time Pete was ten, the brothers, enthusiastic fossil collectors, had scrawled MUSEUM on a scrap of wood and mounted the sign on a pole, crowning it with the sun-bleached skull of a cow. Pete went on to earn a geology degree at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and to cofound a commercial hunting and prep company called the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. By 1990, Black Hills, located in a small but stunning and biologically complex mountain range by the same name, was known as one of the world’s largest hunters, preppers, mounters, and casters of museum-grade fossils; the company had donated or supplied materials to the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

  The Larson brothers hoped to build a standalone dinosaur museum one day, and in the late summer of 1990, Pete believed he’d found his centerpiece. One strangely foggy morning at the end of the field season, he and his crew were working near Faith, a blip on the lonesome highway between Mud Butte and Red Elm, when his girlfriend, Sue Hendrickson, a successful amber hunter by trade, walked out to a sandstone cliff she’d been wanting to explore. There, she found a nearly complete T. rex weathering right out of the bluff. “I don’t know if it’s a sixth sense or luck, but there’s something going on,” she later wrote. “When I’m attuned to something I’m looking for, I find it.”

  The skeleton turned out to be 42 feet long and 13 feet tall at the haunches, with a skull the size of a bathtub and teeth that measured over 6 inches each—the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex of the twelve or so on record. Pete later said Tyrannosaurus Sue, as he called the specimen, coul
d have “swallowed my kids as if they were multivitamins.”

  What seemed like the best possible luck quickly turned into a mess. The Black Hills Institute bought the skeleton for $5,000 from Maurice Williams, the Sioux rancher on whose land the bones were located. Williams later disputed the transaction, saying he was the skeleton’s rightful owner. The Cheyenne River Sioux got involved because Williams’s ranch was on the reservation. Then the Department of the Interior got involved because the federal government was holding the Williams ranch in trust, in lieu of property taxes. Then federal law enforcement got involved because some officers had been wanting to get tougher on wayward fossil collectors, and here was an opportunity to delve into a commercial company’s business practices. The FBI raided Black Hills and confiscated Tyrannosaurus Sue on the grounds that Larson and company had taken the bones from federal property. The news cycle filled with images of Hill City townspeople protesting with FREE SUE! signs. Black Hills’ chief fossil preparator transformed his vintage Checker cab into a protest vehicle, the side panels hand-lettered with SUE HAS ALREADY SERVED 65,000,000 YEARS. Video crews captured the National Guard carting the crated dinosaur away in trucks. A real estate agent named Marv supposedly lay down in the road in an attempt to block their departure. Children chased after the dinosaur, crying.

  The ensuing criminal charges echoed the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s position that the commercial fossil trade posed a clear and significant threat to science. Robert Hunt, a University of Nebraska geology professor, later told American Lawyer magazine that he and other SVP members spoke out against the Black Hills Institute partly because the media incorrectly characterized paleontologists as “divided on this issue” when in fact they were “unanimous in condemnation of this supposed institute.” The claim wasn’t true. The AMNH’s Mark Norell, for one, thought the Larsons were getting a bad deal owing to overzealous law enforcement and a careerist prosecutor, and at least two other scientists, including the Smithsonian’s Clayton Ray, resigned their SVP membership over the issue. The well-known paleontologist Robert Bakker, who completed his undergraduate degree at Yale and his PhD at Harvard, spoke out against science “extremists,” saying, “Because these people have their PhDs they think they have some God-given duty to protect antiquities and fossils. They’re like self-appointed guardians of the faith; they want to make fossils off-limits to anyone without a doctorate. It’s especially tragic because it threatens good amateurs—who’ve done more for the science than anyone.”

  Bakker resembled a time-traveling miner, with his grizzled beard and a battered straw hat that looked, as Pete Larson once put it, as if it “fell from his head during a buffalo stampede.” Bakker and Larson were friends, and they often discussed why the relationship between paleontologists and commercial fossil hunters had soured so badly. Natural history museums owed their existence to independent collectors, yet scientists seemed to view them all with resentment and suspicion. Bakker blamed Sputnik. After Russia launched the satellite in 1957 the United States increasingly invested in science—“‘the real sciences,’ Bakker hastened to add, because everyone knows putting old bones together is a very different process than serious endeavors such as finding a cure for cancer or landing on the moon,” Larson once wrote, adding that according to Bakker’s theory, the space race affected all of science:

  Americans wanted to see their scientists finding things and digging things up and building things, and doing all of this before anyone in Russia did. It didn’t take long for paleontologists to realize that if they wanted to get funded like other scientists, they had to start looking like other scientists. “They had to wear white lab coats,” Bakker explains, “they had to make proposals and marketing plans, and move around boardrooms as if they knew what they were doing….Competition for funding changed (the dynamic). Defining more than how paleontologists looked, this fever sought to change who we were.

  After a six-week trial, Larson was sentenced to two years in prison on charges that had nothing to do with Tyrannosaurus Sue. A jury found him guilty of misdeclaring cash and travelers’ checks at customs, buying fossils that had been taken illegally from Custer Gallatin National Forest, and removing fossils valued commercially at less than a hundred dollars from Buffalo Gap National Grassland. He served eighteen months at the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

  Meanwhile, Maurice Williams, the rancher, got Tyrannosaurus Sue. Sotheby’s auctioned the skeleton in New York City on October 4, 1997, in a deal brokered by David Redden, the auction house’s executive vice president. Redden had sold (or would sell) the Duchess of Windsor’s jewels; the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.; the estates of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Andy Warhol; and an “unspeakably fresh” first-run copy of the Declaration of Independence, which a collector had found at a Pennsylvania flea market, framed behind a four-dollar painting. “The Declaration of Independence is just a piece of paper. In determining its value, you can explain it to other people, and it becomes precious to them, too, and you’ve done more than just make the document worth $4 million or $5 million, you’ve actually done something significant,” Redden once told the New York Times. “That’s the irony in a capitalistic society: by conferring value on an object, you save it.” Redden had approached Williams about auctioning the “world treasure” T. rex, later telling the media, “We have never sold anything of this importance, and nobody else has either.”

  The McDonald’s corporation and Walt Disney Company teamed up to buy Tyrannosaurus Sue for the Field Museum in Chicago. One newspaper had wondered just how much Chicago would have paid to ensure that “‘Da Bears’ and ‘Da Bulls’ were joined by ‘Da Bones,’” but now everyone knew the answer. The price, with the buyer’s premium, came to a staggering, unprecedented $8.36 million. Williams walked away with $7.6 million, tax free. The Smithsonian’s Kirk Johnson later said, “The day they sold Sue is the day fossils became money.”

  The sale proved dinosaur bones could be bought and sold in America like a Brancusi bronze. One good skeleton could put a family’s kids through college or pay off the mortgage on a ranch. A single spectacular rex tooth alone might go for $10,000. Ranchers turned to fossil prospecting to make up for climate-related losses of livestock and crop, leasing their land to commercial crews and taking a cut of any big sale. Cretaceous formations crawled with a new generation of hunters, some with enough money to muscle underfunded scientists out of their longtime research sites. “I don’t want to offend any collectors, and I know I have no right to say, ‘Don’t buy fossils’—it’s a free country, it’s a free market,” the DePaul University paleobiologist Kenshu Shimada later told Collectors Weekly. “But if people decide to buy a fossil to display it in their home, I want them to understand the ramifications.” Buying fossils removed potentially important specimens from proper study and stoked the market, which drove demand, which inspired poaching, all of which threatened to push paleontologists out of the field and fossils beyond the reach of scientific research.

  At one point, Frank Garcia proposed to his Smithsonian contact Clayton Ray that scholars and dealers come together for a “town hall” meeting to work it out. Ray responded with a note that Frank would keep for the rest of his life, calling it “the smoking gun.” Ray said science and the public interest had always depended on the amateur community and that “an ever larger and more sophisticated public is what will save more fossils and advance paleontology, not heavy handed (and unenforceable) restrictions.” Yet “extremists” within the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology now dominated the discussion, Ray told Frank; he had “given up.”

  Eric went on building Florida Fossils as he worked his way through college. His courses were so challenging he realized he needed to drop either the swimming or the hunting. Once Doris heard the news, she said, “Okay, if you not doing the swimming anymore, I do the swimming for you.” She had not competed since she was a girl in Germany, but into the pool she went, winning ten gold medals in the Florida Senior Games the year
she turned fifty-nine.

  At one point Eric heard there might be fossils at a quarry near the town of Brooksville, where hobbyists and commercial hunters were no longer allowed to hunt. Fossil clubs’ codes of conduct now prohibited trespassing, though some hunters ignored the rules, feeling comfortable and entitled after so many years of access. Mines sprawled like moonscapes and were hard to police; guards had been known to simply ask, “Find anything today?” and go on their way. Hunters figured that if they got busted, they would simply be asked to leave.

  Eric entered the Brooksville locality and found fossil birds, reptiles, amphibians, and the extraordinary remains of extremely small mammals. The average hunter wouldn’t necessarily have recognized the materials as important—“Once you’re dealing with the tiny little teeth of mice and bats, if you’re not a trained scientist you may not be able to tell they’re millions of years old, and very rare,” Richard Hulbert, the FMNH vertebrate collections manager, later said—but Eric knew the fossils’ significance and said he told the museum about them.

  Since the fall of his freshman year, he had volunteered at the natural history museum as a laboratory assistant in the vertebrate paleontology department. David Webb, the paleontologist who had received so many of Frank Garcia’s finds, had put him to work cataloging and prepping fossils, particularly shark teeth. The museum displayed a dugong rib that Eric had donated. The Brooksville site promised to be another contribution: it turned out to be an important deposit of Florida’s earliest mammals. The locality, 25 million years old, captured a moment in the planet’s history when mammals were about to grow large and flourish.