The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  This particular game warden had gotten lucky. He’d spotted several men out there in the middle of nowhere, acting strange. One of the men had fled, but the warden had stopped the other two and called in the Pine Ridge office of the Nebraska National Forest. A Forest Service paleontologist named Barbara Beasley had soon arrived to question the suspects, who were from Wisconsin. One, a naturalist in his early sixties, collected fossil bumblebees. His companions were a welder and former upholsterer who taught at Lakeshore Technical College, and his son, who was in his late twenties. Beasley split the suspects up for questioning. When she told one to empty his backpack he pulled out fossils wrapped in newspaper. The remains were brontothere, an enormous rhinoceros-like plant eater that lived around 43 million years ago in North America and Asia. The Sioux, who had long come across its bones on the prairie, called the animal “Thunder Beast.”

  When broken bones fossilize, crystals sometimes grow inside them. That’s what had happened to these bones. The suspect had told Beasley the Wisconsin winters were long and that he had planned to make the crystals into jewelry. “He wouldn’t admit to me that he had fossils, just kept calling the material laid out in front of him crystals,” Beasley later said.

  She understood the financial and thrill-seeking incentives that drove poaching, but the brontothere case inspired her to also understand the mechanism. The overwhelming majority of fossil sales were legal, she knew, but some of them were not, and even though the PRPA was under consideration, no single law enforcement agency had a comprehensive view of the situation. To get an idea of the potential scope of fossil sales, she emailed a well-known dealer in Colorado, Charlie Magovern, asking, “What is the percent difference between fossils sold at wholesale and fossils sold at retail?”

  “It can be anywhere from twenty to four hundred percent depending on the initial cost,” Magovern told her. “Very inexpensive items that were purchased for under a dollar could be marked up to three or four times the wholesale cost.” And very expensive items, “say in the range of $100,000 or more, may be marked up as little as twenty percent, or even less,” he added, “depending on the seller’s cost of doing business.” Auction houses assessed buyers and sellers twenty percent each over the hammer price “unless it is a very expensive item, then they assess fifteen percent of each,” Magovern went on, describing a practice he called keystoning: “Generally the retail is, as with most business, double the price the reseller pays for the item.”

  As government officials considered the PRPA, the sales stream of Chinese specimens happened to slow. Then a source of dinosaurs appeared, with skeletons rivaling that of Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Andreas Guhr, a German gemologist with a broad face and dark hair that curled at his shirt collar, lived in Hamburg, where he had studied at the University of Fine Arts and trained as a ceramist, painter, and graphic designer before becoming a dealer of natural history. A mineral wholesaler, Guhr was known for his enormous personal collection, which included the “biggest amethyst druse in the world.” He had started a natural history museum in Hamburg and would coauthor a book called Crystal Power, wherein he attempted to trace the mythology and cultural significance of gems and minerals from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt to Greece, Rome, and Europe. For his author photo he posed shirtless with a crystal the size of a fire hydrant.

  Guhr would eventually own an interior design company called RedGallery (“Nature at Home”), selling zebra jasper, geodes, and furniture made with petrified logs from Arizona and Crooked River, Oregon. Like auction houses, private galleries now presented natural history with a posh lexicon and a splash of QVC: “This extremely valuable log… shows noble blueish tones, porcelain-like in appearance surrounded by a coffee-and-milk coloured bark…” Guhr promoted himself as someone who had “led expeditions to the most distant corners of the world.” In the summer of 1992, he had returned for at least the second year in a row to Mongolia in search of dinosaur bones, an excursion recounted at length by the magazine GEO, once described as Germany’s National Geographic. The cover story, “The Grave of the Dragons,” appeared in July 1993, but photocopies of the article were still passed around at Tucson.

  The article’s author had followed the “expedition” south from Ulaanbaatar by plane, into the Gobi. “What a magical word!” he wrote. The Gobi was “still a huge space filled with secrets, in which new discoveries are always possible.” The article called Guhr a “new kind of dragon hunter” who “operated a flourishing trade in the hope of being able to finance further scientific-paleontological excavations with the proceeds.”

  Guhr was traveling with paleontologists from the University of Hamburg, accompanied by Mongolian scientists, “foremost among them” the veteran paleontologist Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar of the national paleontological center of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. At one point Guhr and the scientists excavated a couple of Protoceratops skeletons. “The find has no especially great scientific value, because the species has already been found very often—but its commercial worth is another matter,” GEO reported. “Private collectors pay high sums for dinosaur skeletons.” In the canyons of the Nemegt Basin, an important late Cretaceous site some 550 miles southwest of Ulaanbaatar, the earth was “positively peppered with fossils.” In some areas “dinosaur heads loomed like allegorical figures in a façade out of the sandstone walls.” There appeared to be thousands of dinosaur bones, the article went on, repeating the adage that there weren’t enough paleontologists throughout the world to collect all the fossils. The lengthy feature altogether depicted an open collaboration between commercial hunters and Mongolian paleontologists, strongly suggesting that some arrangement allowed dealers to dig Gobi dinosaurs and sell them at market. So it wasn’t much of a surprise, to Eric, to come across a Mongolian skull one September at the annual fossil show in Denver, at the booth of the dealer Tom Lindgren.

  Lindgren specialized in the Green River fossil fish and plants of Utah and Wyoming, and had shown at Tucson since 1986. In the early 1990s, he became what he called “QVC’s Indiana Jones,” cohosting the show The Fossil Exhibit. “We would bring fossils that we could sell en masse,” he once said. “‘Here’s a shark tooth—we can sell a thousand of these. Here’s a fossil fish, here’s an insect in amber.’” The show premiered on the day Jurassic Park hit the theaters, selling out four thousand pieces of amber in forty minutes. Video footage showed Lindgren in the field and the prep lab, explaining his work. “Because as we know, it’s the story that really sells most of these products,” he later said.

  But “the art of presentation” was best achieved at trade shows, and Lindgren enjoyed the events, especially Tucson. Billionaires wanted “their own private time” with him, he once said: “They like to be romanced.” His expansive booth might feature a massive Triceratops behind stanchions and ropes, or a rare Green River snake, or, in this case, as Eric saw, a nicely mounted Tarbosaurus bataar skull with a mouthful of spiked teeth.

  Lindgren also worked as the natural history broker for the Los Angeles branch of the auction house Bonhams. He had handled some of Eric’s past items, and had found him to be polite and hardworking, with a lovely family. “You’d shake his hand and you didn’t need a contract because his handshake was good,” he said. Eric, in turn, knew Lindgren as one of the industry’s most successful dealers. If Eric could get a skull like Lindgren’s—and more of the dinosaurs that were coming out of Mongolia the way fossils had once poured out of China—he could achieve that golden ratio: acquire bones cheaply in the rough, then transform them into skeletons that sold big. A good prepper could turn a considerable profit by producing something close to art. Eric started asking around.

  CHAPTER 8

  MIDDLEMAN IN JAPAN

  THE SAME YEAR GEO PUBLISHED THE ARTICLE ON ANDREAS Guhr’s commercial exploits in Mongolia, Hollis Butts was a “happy tourist enjoying a stroll” around Medicine Bow, Wyoming, a tiny town founded in 1868 as a water stop along the transcontinental railroad.

  Five mil
es east lies Como Bluff, a once renowned site in the “bone wars” between Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, the East Coast paleontologists who nearly killed themselves (and each other) battling for dinosaur bones in the late 1800s. The rapid westward expansion after the Civil War had put more people on the ground in unexplored territories; more eyes meant more finds, and Marsh and Cope wanted it all. They spied and sabotaged, and they brutalized each other in the press. Their competitiveness left them more or less broke and alone at the end of their lives, but in the meantime they advanced the young field of paleontology, giving rise to American science, in large part thanks to the sweep of Jurassic rock near Medicine Bow. Documented dinosaur skeletons and trackways had been turning up in America at least since 1802, but it was Como Bluff that became the world’s first major dinosaur discovery site—stegosaurs, camarasaurs, apatosaurs, allosaurs, and the massive Diplodocus. “It was Jurassic Park, finally,” the paleontologist Robert Bakker once said. “These Jurassic critters are a world like none before, none after. The average size of a plant eater was… five, six, seven tons. Many of the plant eaters go a hundred feet, a hundred and twenty feet,” the latter of which could walk onto a baseball diamond and straddle both first and second base.

  In the late 1890s, as the querulous Marsh and Cope approached their deathbeds, the American Museum of Natural History sent paleontologists to Como Bluff to see what was left. Under the direction of the paleontologist Walter Granger, crews opened new sites, naming one the Bone Cabin Quarry, after a shepherd’s cottage whose foundation had been built with local dinosaur bone. Nearby lived a middle-aged rancher named Thomas Boylan, who, in 1908, received homestead status just south of the low silhouette of Como Bluff. He opened a Texaco filling station there and made a stone cottage to live in, building it 90 feet long to echo the size of Diplodocus. In his spare time, Boylan collected dinosaur bones, hoping to build a complete specimen; he eventually gave up, telling a reporter that “erecting such a skeleton is a long and costly task for an individual to undertake, so I abandoned the idea and proceeded to use [the bones] the best way I could.”

  Boylan and his son Edward got out their hammers. Next door to the filling station they built a one-room cabin that measured 19 feet from the front door to the back wall, and 29 feet end to end. From a distance the façade appeared to have been made with river stone, but come close and you saw a replica of the shepherd’s cabin: the “stone” was 5,796 dinosaur fossils—chunks of vertebrae, femurs, pelvis, all masoned together in a fantastical, functional mosaic. The “bone cabin” yielded easy marketing slogans: “The world’s oldest building,” “The building that used to walk.” Boylan opened it as a roadside fossil museum in 1933, just as Sinclair, an oil company that operated out of the Wyoming town of the same name, began using dinosaurs as mascots. Boylan’s “Dinosaurium” made Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and survived for decades as a tourist attraction that he ran with his wife, Gracey. The construction of Interstate 80 eventually diverted traffic; by then Boylan was dead. Gracey sold the property and it remained in private hands, along with Como Bluff. Bone Cabin closed as a tourist attraction but visitors still made their way there, and to Medicine Bow, or what was left of it.

  “With nothing much to do, I picked up a copy of the Medicine Bow Post,” Butts, the “happy tourist,” told his Facebook friends, describing his 1993 visit. The newspaper’s articles included one about the West being the “true America,” and another about the positive impact of the movie Jurassic Park. Describing an interview with Brent Breithaupt, a Bureau of Land Management paleontologist and curator of the University of Wyoming Geological Museum, Butts said the newspaper noted—

  Breithaupt is active in a movement to create tougher legislation to prevent poaching of fossils on public land. Recently an almost complete Stegosaurus skeleton was found in Wyoming and sold to a Japanese collector. “It is unfortunate that it is gone,” Breithaupt said. “Every fossil tells a story and since this one was almost complete, we could have learned a great deal, but it’s gone. Science loses, the public loses, we all lose.”

  Butts wrote, “Well, I was the scumbag who had brokered that deal, so I knew the true story. I liked the way the article slyly suggested that the stegosaurus [sic] was an example of a poached fossil. But it actually came from near the Bone Cabin Quarry, off a private ranch. It was not sold to a Japanese collector but to a Japanese museum. It was not almost complete, but about 65% there… Science lost nothing.”

  Breithaupt would not have agreed. Wyoming’s particularly magnificent and old fossils show the landscape’s changes through time, he once explained: “The seas came in, the seas went out, the seas came in, the seas went back out again. The mountains rose up, they weathered down; the mountains rose up again, and we have animals and plants that reflect… these changes of environments. These are parts of America that are scientifically and educationally important. These are parts of America’s heritage that are irreplaceable.”

  It was Hollis Butts’s name that Eric learned when he asked how dealers were acquiring Mongolian dinosaurs. Vendors knew Butts as someone who showed up at Tucson in a floppy fishing hat and safari vest, carrying a backpack; he always had “wonderful things, beautiful things—they were gorgeous things to sell,” one dealer recalled, “but everything was pretty much in Japan.”

  Butts lived about two hours northwest of Tokyo, in Saitama Prefecture, with his wife and beautiful daughters. His Facebook profile photo would later show an old black-and-white image of a lanky young man in a fishing hat, standing alongside a loin-clothed couple and children in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I had a map, a sleeping bag in a small back pack [sic], a bag with a strap, a pair of trousers, mosquito coils, matches, a pair of socks, three shirts, a bar of soap, a small knife, 3 underwear, a hat, passport, and some money. That was all and it was enough,” read the caption. “Young and fearless. I was never happier.”

  The available data on Butts provided only shards of a biography. He came from Garden Grove, California, in Orange County, south of L.A. The son of a World War II veteran, he graduated from Pacifica High School in 1968, where he participated in German Club. He studied physical anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and served in the military before settling in Japan, where he married, started a family, and worked as a restorer of “really old” Japanese furniture. He sold fossils on the side and had a booth at the annual Tokyo show. On Facebook, he professed to adore quizzes, tardigrades, economics, and garden creatures. The USS Constitution and the HMS Victory were two of his favorite ships. His home in Chichibu City, an ancient town of about 70,000, known for its silk, Buddhist temples, and vistas of Mount Buko, was, in fact, built “much like a ship,” with “hand-carved joints, massive wooden beams.” He enjoyed studying ancient Greece and was “especially interested in their warfare and triremes,” the war boats with three sets of oars. Although he admired cockroaches he killed them. A self-described libertarian, Butts liked the Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, who has been called the “grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism.” At one point, Butts posted about a Los Angeles woman caught between state and municipal laws that simultaneously required her to maintain her lawn and not to water her lawn because of drought. “Is life now so regulated by the government that it needs to supervise your lawn?” he wondered.

  Butts’s fossil sales turned up in the published acknowledgments of paleontology papers, and in the press. One story involved Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, the distinguished behavioral neurologist who directed the Center for the Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. As a child in his native India, Ramachandran was obsessed with magic tricks and fossils, having developed an intense interest in evolution and taxonomy; he enjoyed sketching seashells and mailing them to the American Museum of Natural History, asking, “Are these new species?” After becoming a scientist and moving to the United States, where his peers knew him “for being able to solve some of the most m
ystifying riddles of neuroscience,” he participated in fossil digs in South Dakota, discovering the Tucson show along the way. In 2004, Ramachandran browsed the event with his friend Clifford Miles, owner of a commercial fossil company in Utah called Western Paleontological Laboratories. Miles had founded the company in 1988, after working as a prepper for the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum at Brigham Young University. He and his brother, Clark, had been cited as coauthors on papers in publications including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. At Tucson, when Miles and Ramachandran came across an odd dinosaur skull, Miles told the neurologist, “You buy it, I’ll name it after you.”

  Ramachandran paid $10,000 for the skull. Cliff and Clark Miles eventually published “Skull of Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani, a new Cretaceous ankylosaur from the Gobi Desert” in Current Science, a journal in India. The brothers described the animal as having a “bull-like appearance” and “flaring nostrils.” They acknowledged Ramachandran as the buyer and thanked the skull’s seller, Hollis Butts, “for making this fossil available to science.” An article soon appeared on the website of the influential science journal Nature, headlined, “Paper sparks fury: Paleontologists criticize publication of specimen with questionable origin.” Any Gobi fossil was by definition illicit, the article pointed out. Ramachandran responded that if someone could prove “laws were indeed broken,” he would return the skull.

  Eric arranged to meet Butts at the Denver show in September 2006. He found an older man, fair-haired and balding, with a ruddy complexion and a backpack containing photo after photo of Mongolian dinosaur bones in the rough. Eric browsed the images as if shopping for boots in the L.L.Bean catalog. The item that spoke to him was the disarticulated skull of Tarbosaurus bataar, similar to the one he had seen in Tom Lindgren’s booth. A jawbone was missing, along with most of the brain case, but overall the skull was roughly 65 percent complete. Eric agreed to pay Butts $18,000 for it. In the spring of 2007, a commercial invoice arrived from Museum Imports Co., Ltd., in Chichibu City, and the skull soon followed.