The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  As the Soviet Union crumbled in the early 1990s, Herskowitz got interested in Russian topaz, alexandrite, rare green garnets, and amber. Jurassic Park was to debut in 1993, its blockbuster plot centering on dinosaur DNA resurrected from amber, and Christian Dior was showing amber jewelry. Sensing an opportunity, Herskowitz acquired a load of amber from a girlfriend, who happened to be in Russia and who liked to shop at flea markets. When he took the amber to Forty-Seventh Street to have it graded, the appraiser noticed an insect in one of the nuggets. Herskowitz pressed his eye to the loupe and stared, not believing what he was seeing: a black fly, as clear and intact as if it had died yesterday.

  How could a fly get into a gemstone? Herskowitz couldn’t figure it out. He wasn’t even sure what amber was.

  One day he told his aunt in Huntington, Long Island, about the insect in amber, which in paleontology is called an inclusion. The remarkable preservation allows scientists to describe new species and better understand evolutionary diversity, sometimes offering clues about how insects cared for their young. The aunt told Herskowitz there was a jewelry store nearby that sold that kind of stuff. Herskowitz immediately went and consigned some of the Russian pieces. A few days later, the jeweler called and told him to come get his money. A client had paid $375, and the jeweler wanted to keep a hundred. Was that okay? Okay? Herskowitz thought. He had paid six bucks! He sent his friend back to the Moscow flea market, telling her to buy all the insect-bearing chunks she could find. She started hauling them to the United States by the luggage load, which wasn’t that difficult because amber travels light.

  The jewelry store could unload only so much, so Herskowitz reached out to the London auction company Bonhams, which was planning a natural history auction in England. Bonhams (once known as Bonhams & Butterfields) accepted a couple hundred pieces of Herskowitz’s amber—and sold them for over $14,000. Herskowitz knew almost nothing about fossils, but he knew profit margin, and in the marriage of amber and auctions he sensed global, untapped promise. At auction, the market decided what was fair. “People fight over stuff and pay what they want!” he once said. “So the fact that buyers would pay fourteen thousand dollars for something that cost me thirty or forty dollars? I loaded up the truck and moved to Bever-ly.”

  As Herskowitz began working London auctions he noticed that most of the major buyers were American. Wondering why natural history auctions hadn’t made it to the States, he pitched the idea to New York City houses, whose leaders included Sotheby’s and Christie’s. London-based Phillips, which dated to 1796 and claimed clients including Marie-Antoinette and Napoléon Bonaparte, was the house that bit. “I must have been a good bullshitter because I’m nobody,” Herskowitz later said. “I mean I just had an idea.”

  Hoping to authenticate the items before the auction, Herskowitz approached paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History. No, they told him: they certainly would not assess scientific materials for commercial purposes.

  But Herskowitz did learn a name.

  A peculiar little shop existed a block away from the museum, and dealt in all things natural history. Maxilla & Mandible had opened in 1983 in a basement space on West Eighty-Second Street, calling itself the world’s first and only osteological store—it sold bones. Human skeletons, reportedly imported from Europe, dangled along one wall like a macabre chorus line. The shop did so well so fast it expanded to Columbus Avenue, between Eighty-First and Eight-Second Streets, where it would remain for the next three decades.

  The owner was Henry Galiano. As a child in Spanish Harlem he was so obsessed with nature that his father, who ran a beauty parlor, regularly took him to the museum, where Henry could name all the creatures. Later, he dropped out of art school in order to work at the American Museum, starting as a janitor and eventually becoming a curatorial assistant in vertebrate paleontology. Galiano was so skilled that one of his supervisors, a paleontologist named Richard Tedford, urged him to go back to school, then realized that “Henry was more of a free spirit.” In the early 1980s, after selling off part of his personal collection of rat and pigeon skulls at the Canal Street flea market, Galiano decided to open his own shop.

  Running Maxilla & Mandible, he discovered what he called a “niche within the public’s innate interest in and attraction to bones.” People enjoyed giving and receiving them as gifts. “If you’ve given someone the scarf and the gloves and the book and can’t think of anything else, give a skull,” Galiano once told People magazine. Another time he said, “Everybody lives in apartments. They buy plastic furniture, manufactured stuff, a stereo from Japan, a camera from Germany. After a while you lose sight of what you are. With bones, you’re in touch with something that’s real.”

  Galiano acquired his inventory through farmers, trappers, African game wardens, Fulton Street fishmongers, and Chicago meatpackers, altogether engaging with a supply network familiar with “slaughterhouses and game-processing plants.” Whenever an “interesting” carcass came in, Galiano got calls. He told the press he would never put a bounty on an endangered species but he might sell the body parts, if given the chance. Early on, he traded in African ivory, the loathsome poaching of which led to bans. “We scrounge everywhere,” he told the New York Times. “I used to pick up road kills. The highways of the United States are great places to collect natural history. This is an opportunistic business.”

  The Maxilla & Mandible basement often reeked of formaldehyde and boiled skulls. A visiting journalist once found the subterranean network of cellars and corridors filled with “buffalo heads peering from dark corners, python bones stretched on a table in elegant sweeping arcs, horse skulls, wart hog tusks, giraffe legs, a complete black bear, and articulated rat skeletons.” In an aquarium, thousands of beetles steadily nibbled at some dead thing’s flesh. Galiano told the reporter, “There’s no life down here.”

  And yet there was life, in death. Maxilla & Mandible’s inventory found resurrection in classrooms, private collections, and museums. The store eventually expanded to other areas of the natural sciences, its staff advertised as “paleontologists, entomologists, osteologists, anthropologists, sculptors, and master craftsmen.” Galiano, who maintained strong friendships with AMNH paleontologists, including Mark Norell, considered his business a vital bridge between the public and science. He attended the Tucson and Denver shows, and eventually acquired a quarry in the Morrison Formation of Wyoming, legendary for Jurassic dinosaurs.

  In the summer of 2011, everything at Maxilla & Mandible was quietly marked half price. One Monday morning in late August, passersby found the door locked and the shop dark after twenty-seven years. The front window, which once showed skulls framed by warm white lights, was opaque with plain brown wrapping paper; a sign on the door read GONE DIGGING. Online, Galiano’s customers mourned. Maxilla & Mandible “wasn’t just a store; it was a unique escape from the city. Whenever you stepped inside you were whisked away to another time…,” wrote one. Another lamented, “Now who will sell us dinosaur bones?”

  The first time David Herskowitz tried to meet Galiano, he failed. Galiano didn’t know Herskowitz, had never heard of Herskowitz. Look me up in Tucson, he said. There, Herskowitz found a slim Asian fellow with longish curly hair and eyeglasses, and an encyclopedic knowledge of natural history. When Herskowitz explained that he wanted to bring natural history auctions to the United States, Galiano was in. Galiano had the market expertise and the museum background, as well as the contacts. The fossil world is so insular, strangers stand out. Dealers weren’t predisposed to accepting Herskowitz, but they knew Galiano.

  What Herskowitz described as the first natural history auction in the United States took place on June 8, 1994, at the Phillips showroom in New York. The standing-room-only event fetched a disappointing $300,000. Yet Herskowitz said company officials told him they’d never seen the room fill up like it did for natural history; Phillips decided to try again.

  Fossils’ association with upscale auction houses stood to elevate the
m in the eyes of buyers. Old brands like Sotheby’s conveyed highbrow respectability, a rarefied counterpoint to the earthier trade shows. To dealers, operating within a world where natural history equaled art felt validating in a way the industry had never seen. Whereas the price could always drop at a trade show, the price at auction could only go up, with no limit on the possible payout. But auctions also provided cover for the grayer areas of the trade. Illicit fossils and forgeries were streaming out of China, selling in the rough at Tucson, and later emerging at market as finished specimens. Chinese dealers advertised in the Tucson show guides. After the Chinese government got stricter, some dealers went on selling, claiming that their fossils had been exported before the new laws took effect. The average buyer had no way of knowing what was true, and dealers knew law enforcement had no way of proving anything. Certain dealers rationalized that there wouldn’t be so many Chinese dinosaurs available if it weren’t legal. Even paleontologists weren’t sure of their information. “You talk to a paleontologist and they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s illegal,’ but very few people have looked at the legal paperwork from that country and know what the legal implications are—and furthermore they probably know very little about how law is enforced in that country,” the Smithsonian’s Kirk Johnson once said. “It was hard to understand what was going on—whether the laws were changing or simply being ignored.”

  Another confusing thing: paleontologists claimed to detest commercial dealers yet allowed them along on excavations as paying paleo-tourists. And some museums seemed to encourage fossil collecting. An invitation from Friends of the New Jersey State Museum had found its way to Eric in the spring of 2001, offering access to Liaoning, a northeastern province of China so hot with fossils that scientists had to post guards at their dig sites. The New Jersey museum’s letter was addressed to “Fellow Fossil Hunters” and described an upcoming “collecting expedition” to the “famous fossil fields at Sihetun, to the quarries which have produced the feathered dinosaur specimens.” The tour guide was to be a University of Pennsylvania graduate student affiliated with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing. Participants would be allowed to collect common fossils to bring home, “subject to approval by the Chinese scientists on site.”

  Eric didn’t sign up for the museum trip, but so many people were talking about Chinese fossils, and so many Chinese fossils were circulating openly, he started buying them in the rough through Tucson contacts—mostly mammals like saber-tooth cats—and prepping them out and selling them. His eBay clients included science teachers, collectors, other dealers, and museums, all of whom left positive, public feedback: “ANOTHER AWESOME TRANSACTION BY THE CHINESE FOSSIL KING!!!!” For a decade Eric maintained a 100 percent positive rating on the site, slipping once, to 99 percent.

  Occasionally, Eric heard of dealers who had been caught poaching or selling bad bones in other countries. He knew a guy who got locked up in Paris and another who got pinched in Uruguay. In Uruguay, the suspect’s wife tried to soften the prospect of overnight incarceration by delivering a pizza and a warm coat to her husband in jail, but all the husband enjoyed that night was the sight of the guards eating his pizza and wearing his coat. Eric listened to the stories with amusement, saying very little at all.

  Amanda wanted to try flipping a house: buy an outdated or run-down property, renovate it, and sell it at a profit. In the early fall of 2004, she and Eric found a bungalow on Southwest Second Avenue, near the university. The house, built in 1929, had a brick façade that had been painted white; two folksy porch columns the color of dried blood; and scraggly landscaping. So, perfect. A mortgage company loaned the Prokopis nearly $200,000 for the purchase and renovation, and after a shark-diving trip to the Farallon Islands, they got to work.

  Contractors’ estimates came in so high the Prokopis decided to gut the place themselves. “We had a ball at Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Home Expo, just having daily shopping sprees,” Amanda wrote in her annual holiday newsletter. To install granite countertops, they Googled “how to install granite countertops.” Whenever possible, they used materials salvaged from Eric’s river dives, such as vintage bricks. Their taste almost always aligned. They had their first disagreement as a married couple after Eric installed a metal desk in their home office. “Uh-uh,” Amanda told him. “This is not a tire store.”

  To save money they moved into the flip as they renovated. They bathed in the backyard, ate out for every meal. Amanda hosted two more successful Everything Earth shows, and at Christmas they drove up to Richmond, for Bizarre Bazaar, using some of the proceeds to “dive into adulthood” and buy Oriental rugs.

  When Eric ran out of fossil prep space in the garage, he moved bones into the gutted kitchen. By now he was finding giant ground sloths—at Tucson, his room at the Ramada Inn-University featured a skeleton that loomed in a back corner, its skull grazing the ceiling. The work was going so well that in May 2005, he decided to take on a partner, a military veteran in his forties with eccentricities that Eric and Amanda found hilarious and endearing. This guy cleaned everything—even his dog’s paws—with puffs of canned air. He washed and ironed his money in case the bills had ever been used in drug deals. He distrusted cell phones so he made passengers in his car leave theirs in the trunk. But the partner was loyal, and knowledgeable about fossils, and he always had “unusual” stuff. Eric bought a retail space with him in Micanopy, an historic town of six hundred just south of Gainesville. The two-story building of pinkish brick sat beneath Spanish moss in a picturesque stretch of antiques shops. Amanda would run Everything Earth in the front, and the guys would use the back rooms and upper floor for prep and storage.

  The Micanopy deal ultimately fell through, but Eric went on working with the other dealer as he and Amanda pursued their projects. At the flip house they kept the white bricks, painted the shutters black, and added an awning. They replaced the hokey porch architecture with sleek Doric columns. A semi-circular driveway and fresh landscaping added curb appeal. The results gave the Prokopis confidence that they had a gift for flipping, though they wouldn’t know for sure until they sold the bungalow at a profit.

  For over a decade Eric had been working with shark teeth and Ice Age mammals, and with miscellaneous pieces like framed insects and giant bats. The Chinese saber cat skulls had been solid income: Eric usually bought them in the rough for up to $6,000 and sometimes sold them for $75,000 at auction. But marriage, the accumulation of property debt, and plans to start a family altogether forced him to think about pursuing projects with the potential for major payout. The big money was in big dinosaurs.

  A handful of countries are known for large dinosaurs, but only one of those countries, the United States, allows commercial hunters to collect and sell whatever they find on private property. Formations like the Hell Creek, which traverses parts of South Dakota and Montana, were prime T. rex territory, but those hunting grounds were already spoken for and highly speculative. A hunter could spend all summer paying to scour a rancher’s badlands and go home with nothing but more debt.

  And the federal government appeared poised to tighten fossil-collecting laws. Recently, Congress had convened a joint subcommittee hearing on the proposed Paleontological Resources Preservation Act, or PRPA, legislation sponsored by Congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts. On June 19, 2003, McGovern had told the subcommittee that despite an “exploding” black market in fossils the United States still hadn’t developed a “clear, consistent, and unified policy” on how to protect paleontological resources. The PRPA called for a standardized system of fossil-collecting permits across federal agencies, required that all significant fossils found on federal property be curated at museums or “suitable depositories” (such as a university collection), and recommended the enactment of tougher penalties for the theft or vandalism of significant fossils. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a worldwide association of over two thousand scientists and a smattering of collectors and dealers, had endorsed the legis
lation, as had the American Association of Museums. Testifying on behalf of the SVP, the paleontologist Catherine Forster had said the “heightened public interest in dinosaurs and other extinct life forms” had given paleontologists an “unprecedented opportunity to share with the public the excitement of recent advances in this fascinating science that records the history of life on our planet” but also had imperiled fossils by making them black-market targets. Fossils of extinct groups are not renewable, Forster had reminded the lawmakers, saying, “More fossils will be discovered and collected, but always from a finite supply.” Even the tiniest grains of sand may yield clues about anything from an animal’s habitat to how long a species survived, which in turn could tell us something about the planet as it exists now or may exist in the future. “As paleontologists and geologists learn more ways to interpret ancient environments and ecological communities from fossil assemblages in their original context, this information becomes more and more valuable and important,” Forster had explained. Because fossils help scientists understand how creatures change over time, “researchers must be able to compare new specimens with those previously unearthed,” she had added, ending her testimony by saying that the increasing commercial value of fossils threatened to distort the scientific record.

  Paleontologists and commercial dealers needed to find a way to work together, yet there was still no formal mechanism for bridging the worlds. Scientists and law enforcement got smidgens of insight into the market with each new poaching case. One such case had begun several months after the Congressional hearing, as a U.S. Department of Fish & Wildlife warden drove through the Oglala National Grassland, a swath of mixed-grass prairies and badlands in northwestern Nebraska. Volcanic ash had once blanketed the area, eventually mixing with sediments that became siltstone, mudstone, claystone, and sandstone, which preserved the remarkable remains of bear-dogs, alligators, tortoises, lizards, oreodonts, peccaries, deer, and false saber-tooth cats. Poachers often hit the formation, called the White River Group, and usually got away with it, because basically there was one federal officer to patrol over a million acres of grasslands.