The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  Eric loaned the museum some of the Brooksville fossils he had dug, and when he went to pick them up a year later they had accession numbers. One of the specimens that he had found had been named for another commercial hunter. Eric never found out why but he figured the FMNH scientists saw his presence at Brooksville as a serious breach. They didn’t acknowledge him as they began publishing papers about the site, and the lack of recognition burned. Once the museum appeared to have finished working at Brooksville, Eric sneaked back inside, to see what was left. When a museum crew found him hunting there, he turned over the buckets of matrix he’d dug, and left. When Eric received a letter from the museum telling him to stay out of quarries where he didn’t belong, he abandoned any allegiance he might’ve felt to science and devoted himself entirely to the hunt. Much later, he would wonder aloud why paleontology was “even important.” After all, fossils are “just basically rocks,” He said, “It’s not like antiquities, where it’s somebody’s heritage and culture and all that.”

  Bill cautioned Eric against pursuing fossils as a hobby after college, but hunting was all Eric wanted to do. To him, no other career option offered such a compelling combination of freedom and opportunity. He stuck to rivers, hacking his way into forbidding thickets and waters. An aquatic journey of ten feet could transport him millions of years back in time. The larger the animal, the more complex the prep work: cleaning a shark tooth was one thing, but mounting the three-dimensional skeleton of a giant armadillo was another, requiring an understanding of anatomy, and of balance and dimension. As the Florida Museum of Natural History once explained, “The process of building a supporting and hidden metal frame for the skeleton and articulating each bone in its proper place, as well as posing the skeleton in a lifelike stance, requires an extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship and ingenuity.”

  Preparators, or preppers, were often independent contractors who worked for commercial dealers as well as museums. Eric had been hiring out a lot of his prep but started doing it himself to avoid backlogs of a year or more. To understand anatomy, he read scientific papers and studied photos and sketches. To make his own mounts, he taught himself how to weld. As his inventory grew, he took his stone zoo to market.

  CHAPTER 6

  TUCSON

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A ROCK AND A MINERAL IS LIKE THE difference between a fruitcake and the fruit that’s in that cake. Minerals make up rocks. Rocks make up landforms. If rocks are the wallflower of geology, minerals are Beyoncé. They’re found pocket and seam throughout the earth in wondrous forms—cylinders, needles, clusters, nuggets, spheres, dipyramids, cubes. Uvarovite looks like blocks of green Jell-O, rhodochrosite like wads of pink bubblegum, cyanotrichite like a bright blue pompom. A stone, on the other hand, is a rock fragment. Precious or semiprecious stones can be cut into gems. Geology’s marvelous lexicon includes batholith, Jolly balance, polymorph, travertine, magma, alluvium, anticline, talus, luster, topaz. The chemistry itself is art: tourmalines are complex boron silicates, or XY3Z6(T6O18)(BO3)3V3W. The formula ultimately produces an object breathtaking to behold: tourmaline can be so brilliantly pink and green, there’s a variety called watermelon.

  Just as Floridians are surrounded by water, Arizonans are surrounded by minerals, more than eight hundred varieties of them. Collectors spend their lives haunting abandoned mines and the unexplored dump piles of dug tunnels. On the night of December 3, 1946, twenty-eight rockhounds met in the Pima County Courthouse, in Tucson. As the country emerged from World War II, many returning servicemen were looking for outdoor hobbies they could pursue with their families. Lapidary equipment—the grinders, carvers, polishers, and saws used in stonecutting and jewel faceting—was becoming affordable, and hobbyists were getting into it. The courthouse group created what is today known as the Tucson Gem & Mineral Society, which hosted field trips, started a library, and recruited University of Arizona faculty and staff as participants and scientists and authors as speakers on topics like “Perambulations through Crystallography.”

  In the spring of 1955, the group put on a show. Nine vendors displayed their collections in an elementary school auditorium, charging no admission. The weather was terrible, but fifteen hundred people showed up. The show then relocated to a rusty Quonset hut at the county fairgrounds, with bad toilets and a leaky roof; attendance doubled, each person paying a quarter to get in. When the show expanded to three days in 1958, so many people signed up for the field trip, the caravan consisted of seventy-five vehicles and a Tucson Police Department escort.

  As the event grew, elite dealers developed a reputation beyond that of rockhound. “After all, one does not call Escoffier a chowhound, or Baryshnikov a toe dancer,” the New York Times reported. “A rockhound might pick up a piece of petrified wood and carve it into an ashtray. The mineral collector who has a chunk of some obscure rock like Quetzalcoatlite prefers to keep it in the same pristine clothing it has worn for 50 million years.”

  In 1960, the show’s organizers invited top museums to exhibit. The only curator who responded was Paul Desautels, the new curator of gems and minerals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “Museum curators have traditionally been regarded as a rather phlegmatic, even laid-back group, primarily concerned with the stewardship of their collections. This was not Paul’s style,” wrote Daniel Appleman, the Smithsonian’s associate director for science. Desautels was a former chemistry professor who had founded the Baltimore Mineral Society. “His unique contribution was to bring to museum curation all of the passionate urgency to build the world’s best collection that characterizes the most successful private collectors.” Desautels set up two Smithsonian exhibits at the Tucson event, showing some of the institution’s most interesting specimens. He delivered talks in a “curtained off portion of the back room infamous for its hard chairs and limited ventilation,” Bob Jones, a lifelong mineral collector and Scottsdale science teacher, wrote in a history of the show.

  Having Desautels on hand was like having Eli Manning at summer football camp. It changed the way organizers obtained exhibits and “meant that people living too far from any major museum could still see at least a small portion of a museum’s collection,” Jones wrote. In exchange, curators had a chance to scope out the excellent stones found by amateurs. Some of the private collections Desautels discovered—Al Haag’s wulfenites; Susie Davis’s rare linarite—eventually became part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. And as the show began turning a profit, the local community benefited in the form of university scholarships and free admission for disadvantaged children.

  Before long, the show became as much about selling and buying as looking: a wholesale section was introduced. After it was temporarily eliminated, dealers took their business outside, to an abandoned gas station, an old barn, and the Holiday Inn South, where Desautels stayed when he was in town. A “quiet closed-door” side market developed at the hotel.

  The Society contractually banned “pre-show selling” because they wanted to provide paying visitors with fresh selections, but when warned about infringing on free trade, show organizers lifted the rule and the side market grew. “American entrepreneurial spirit (particularly strong among independent-minded mineral dealers) meant that dealers had an irresistible urge to do business whenever and wherever the opportunity might arise,” Jones wrote. Dealers started renting a “sleeping room,” a “selling room,” and a booth at the show, and also sold items out of the trunks of their cars. The hotel sales culture spread to the Desert Inn, the Vagabond, the Pueblo, the Ramada.

  An old town, Tucson was already popular with tourists, filmmakers, and the mob. (“It was pretty much agreed that any mafioso who wanted to take a vacation could go to Tucson and be okay,” Jones said.) Wintertime Tucson was not a hard sell: the show happens in late January and early February, as the palo verde trees and saguaro cactuses bloom. But really it’s “good rocks that bring folks in,” Jones said. So much so that in the 1970s, the event moved to the city’s n
ew convention center. The show went international after the British Museum mounted an exhibit. In came Colombian emeralds and Russian malachites. The Sorbonne brought cumengite crystals found in Baja. There were pegamites from Afghanistan. Magnesite from Brazil. Vanadinite from Morocco. Swiss gwindels. Indian zeolites. Tasmanian crocoite was “lap-carried on the plane all the way from Australia,” eventually to be displayed at the Harvard Mineralogical & Geological Museum. An American Museum of Natural History exhibit featured J. P. Morgan gold. “Museum curators would spread the word: Oh, you’ve got to go to this show!” Jones said. The city’s most important event used to be the rodeo, then a golf tournament; now it was gems and minerals.

  For a collector, Tucson was Earth, sized to buy. It’s hard to estimate the annual monetary value of the current global trade in natural history, but it’s easy to say the industry would not exist to the extent it does today without Tucson. The city name itself has become synonymous with the marketplace: you don’t say, “They saw it in Tucson,” but rather, “They saw it at Tucson.” Dealers, collectors, scientists, preppers, artists, curiosity seekers—and, lately, undercover federal agents—descend upon the city for what has been described as the “New York Stock Exchange of the mineral world.”

  If not for Tucson, fossils might never have found such an easy home in the natural history trade. They became a regular presence in the 1970s, and in 1986, commercial fossil hunters were formally invited to show. By the 1990s, a Colorado collector and promoter named Martin “Marty” Zinn III had developed fossils into their own event.

  For paleontologists, Tucson was both a thrill and an abomination. “Some of the things I saw made me sick,” a UC-Berkeley paleontologist, William Clemens, once said. “I saw a rare fossil amphibian from Russia on sale, accompanied by a certificate from Russia’s Paleontological Institute allowing export of this treasure. The Russians must certainly be hard up to let things like that go.” Others thought some of their fellow scientists were getting a little hysterical. “This whole campaign by the federal cops against the fossil business is ridiculous, considering all the murderers out there that remain to be caught,” John Maisey, an AMNH ichthyologist, said at one point.

  There was no real oversight at the show. If you wanted a booth, all you had to do was fill out a form and describe your inventory, and maybe send a photo or two, remembered Jones, a longtime member of the organizing committee. The vendor-vetting process happened largely by word of mouth, a “sort of self-policing thing,” he said. “People on the committee would say, ‘Oh yeah, I know that dealer, he’s good,’ or, ‘I don’t know about that guy.’ It was an informal monitoring system. Later on, when the show got so big, it didn’t matter—anybody who wanted a space would get it, if there was space.”

  For a fee, the hotels moved furniture out of the rooms, clearing the way for display cabinets and sales tables, the spaces so transformed they resembled small shops instead of cookie-cutter suites. Dealers sold fossils from right off the tops of their bedspreads and televisions. Jones, who cohosted a TV program about the show, liked walking into hotel rooms and saying, “Okay, what do you got in the bathroom?” He later explained, “These are the minerals that are quietly sold to special customers who’ve been notified usually ahead of time: ‘I’ve got such-and-such for you, come see it.’ Those items never or rarely go on public display. There’s nothing underhanded about it. They’re not being secretive about it. It’s simply a way of doing business.” Materials that a dealer knew to be illicit were generally kept out of sight, not that law enforcement would’ve known the difference—they were more likely to check for work visas, though that rarely happened, either. The City of Tucson wasn’t about to step in to make sure every last bone was legit: by 2014, the shows would boost the annual local economy by $120 million and generate over $10 million in city taxes. Policing everything wasn’t even possible at an event with so many strands, especially when so much of the inventory was impossible to trace. Buyers learned about authenticity through experience, and by reading websites and talking to dealers who enjoyed teaching.

  Forty-three shows eventually took place simultaneously across town, in ballrooms, warehouses, parking lots, hotel rooms, and tents. Foreign vendors often stowed their materials in self-serve storage units year to year, and kept U.S. bank accounts. An event that had started with nine mineral enthusiasts attracted four thousand dealers in 2017. Even if you stayed the whole two weeks, it would be impossible to fully absorb the Tucson experience, though with the right questions and contacts it was possible to learn who had the nice lapis lazuli, and which guy to see about a dinosaur.

  Eric graduated from college in December 1996 and moved back to Land O’ Lakes in the spring, back into his childhood bedroom, running Florida Fossils out of his parents’ house. As a student, his life had rotated around semesters; now it revolved around Tucson in February, and the Denver show in September. Most days, he left the house in the morning and stayed gone until dark, returning with a pickup filled with river bones. After supper he worked in the garage or the driveway late into the night, when the stuccoed nooks of the front stoop attracted live décor in the form of jumpy green frogs. The newspapers that once covered his swimming now wrote about his fossils: “Love of paleontology evolves into business.” One photo showed Eric at the Prokopi kitchen table with a saber-tooth cat skull and a megalodon tooth half a foot long. Asked how he had made such interesting finds, Eric said, elaborately: “I just dove, collected, and read up on it.”

  At twenty-two, he had a buzz cut and a wide, shy smile. His hands were morphing into huge parodies of hands. “Today, in spite of his young age, Prokopi has gained a reputation in the field as a veteran fossil hunter,” one newspaper noted. Doris and Bill remained unconvinced, but the paper declared that Eric had found a promising career, in which he preferred hunting to retail. “I don’t like setting up shops,” he said. “I’d rather be out collecting.”

  Fossil dealers typically stockpiled inventory, saving up for the big shows, but the advent of the internet allowed them to sell year-round. Eric signed up for an AOL account. One day at the end of August 1999, he entered a chat room about scuba diving. A recent University of Tennessee graduate named Amanda Graham happened to be in there, looking for information about rivers. A native of Williamsburg, Virginia, she had just started a job as a SeaWorld dolphin trainer and wanted to know the best places to dive.

  Eric volunteered that he knew some good spots. As they chatted online Amanda noticed that he didn’t force himself on her like other guys did. “Why don’t you take me diving?” she finally said. He agreed, telling her, “I’ve seen it all, so I’ll let you pick the place.”

  They planned to go that very Saturday. In the meantime, they talked on the phone and traded emails and photos, the sight of which unsilenced Eric like never before. “Wow! I got chills and butterflies in my stomach when I saw you,” he told Amanda in one email. “I can’t wait to see you in person…” One night after they had talked for hours on the phone, Eric emailed to say he’d been thinking about her so much he could hardly eat. He kept calling her answering machine and hanging up, just to hear her voice.

  They chose the Santa Fe River, north of Gainesville, for their first date. “If you want lunch, bring what you want because I don’t know what kind of weird stuff you eat,” he emailed her. “If you like, later we can get dinner and a movie or something in Gainesville, if you’re into that kind of thing.” He said, “And by the way, with the affect [sic] you have on me, I might get excessively nervous and shy, so if you want a kiss or anything, go for it. I feel stupid saying that, but I know how much you like kissing and everything, and I don’t want to screw up.”

  A hundred years earlier, loggers with axes and two-man saws cut cypress and longleaf pine from old-growth forests, lashed the logs together with metal “spike dogs,” and floated them downstream to sawmills. Untold thousands of logs dropped along the way. The cool, low-oxygen water of the river depths cured the wood to fine-grained
reds and browns. Deadheads, the logs were called. Salvaging them for money was called deadheading. Deadheaders looked for logs marked with the X’s and cuts of lumbermen a century gone and raised them to the surface by cable and winch. The logs were ten times more precious than regular wood, the value rising by the year. Anyone could become a deadheader as long as he had enough money to buy a $5,500 state permit, and enough time, resources, and energy to find and pull the logs.

  Chad Crawford, host of a TV series called How to Do Florida, once showed viewers how deadheading worked. He drove to the Choctawhatchee River in northwestern Florida to find a log he could make into a mantel, and met up with Rich Mitchell, a deeply tanned deadheader with a silver goatee who worked for Bruner Lumber Company. “I don’t quite know what I got myself into,” Crawford said the night before the dive.

  “You got yourself into a whole lot of, ah, danger,” Mitchell told him. In his estimation deadheading was “about an eight” on a ten-point danger scale. Some of these logs were five or six feet across, and weighed tons. “This is not something that we just let anybody come up here and do,” he told Crawford. “You’re fixing to get off into a river full of alligators, poisonous snakes—and beautiful lumber!”

  The next morning Crawford met Mitchell and two other deadheaders at the river and was introduced to his dive partner, Lexie Cook, a burly guy everyone called “Bobo.” “You’ve got to really know what you’re doing, diving rivers, especially if they’re swift-running rivers and deep,” Bobo told Crawford. They piloted two fishing boats and a winch platform out onto the water. As Crawford and Bobo stepped into their wetsuits, the veterans looked over the newbie’s getup. “What is all that?” Bobo said.