The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  Mongolia’s Natural History Museum occupied half a city block at the corner of Sukhbaatar Street and Zaluuchuud Avenue, a large intersection behind Government House, home of parliament. The building was white, three stories tall, with six columns embedded in its flaking façade. It saddened paleontologists to see the leaky roof, and to know that the fluctuating temperatures and crumbling interior threatened the very fossils the building was supposed to protect. These included, treasure of all treasures, the “fighting pair,” a stunning scene of mortal combat between a Protoceratops and a Velociraptor, found by a 1971 Polish-Mongolian expedition led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska. Even as they recognized the museum’s impossible financial situation, outside paleontologists lamented the lack of proper facilities to store one of the world’s most glorious discoveries.

  Catercorner behind the museum sat a redbrick structure, low and long like a chicken coop. Originally built as a garage, the building had been the Mongolian Academy of Sciences’s paleontology center and laboratory for the last thirty years, despite its leaky roof and sputtering electricity. The museum and lab were together a sort of compound whose yard was used as a staging area for joint expeditions. The American Museum of Natural History teams stored their automobiles and gear there, in color-faded shipping containers lined up like sunbaked beach cabanas.

  The Mongolian paleontologists wanted badly to build a new headquarters and laboratory. They envisioned updated facilities befitting the importance of Mongolian fossils, where foreign scientists would feel comfortable. The government couldn’t afford refurbishments—the government could barely afford science. Before the democratic revolution, Mongolia had claimed a hundred scientific research institutes, three thousand researchers, and an “annual influx of scientists from other parts of the East Bloc,” Science reported. The Soviets had built seismological stations to monitor nuclear tests in China and funded a hilltop full of telescopes “to observe U.S. spy satellites through Mongolia’s clear skies.” After the revolution, the number of institutes dropped to twenty. At least a third of Mongolia’s scientists had altogether abandoned research. The Ministry of Enlightenment spent around $3 million a year on science. As inflation spiked by over 300 percent, the money bought precious little. Scientists lamented that they were paid only with “whatever is left over after all the other programs are funded.”

  A private natural history museum in Japan, the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences, eventually built the paleontologists a new headquarters, a two-story brick building that abutted the old laboratory. In the narrow atrium a T. bataar skeleton stood blocked off as if walking through a flower bed. The updated lab had an observation window so visitors could watch the preparators work. Tsogtbaatar, the center’s chief, worked upstairs in a corner office, where foreign scientists gathered to ask for access to the Gobi and plot expeditions. An enormous topographical map of Mongolia hung on Tsogtbaatar’s wall, along with portraits of Mongolian dinosaurs and Genghis Khan.

  A skinny young man in large eyeglasses could often be seen at the paleontological center and in the Natural History Museum’s dimly lit galleries. He had dark, floppy hair and tended to dress in jeans and preppy madras-plaid shirts and argyle sweaters. One day, he made his way to the prep lab, where he met Chultem Otgonjargal, “Otgo,” a micropaleontologist and the lab’s chief preparator. Stocky, with straight hair and protruding teeth, Otgo had been a paleontologist since the 1980s. He routinely participated in joint Gobi expeditions and had prepared numerous Gobi dinosaur specimens, most recently a Saurolophus skull, two Protoceratops skulls, and a complete Gallimimus.

  The visitor introduced himself as a businessman and a collector who, now that the laws had changed, hoped to buy fossil-bearing land and open his own museum. His name was Tuvshinjargal Maam. One of his relatives had worked at the Natural History Museum, and Tuvshin hoped to volunteer as a field hand, at one point saying that if the “government paid the poor Gobi people to look for fossils, they could fill a museum with good fossils every four or five years.”

  Tuvshin told Otgo he owned a travel company called Chinggis Khaan Ltd., and asked if he wanted a side job as a private guide showing his clients the Gobi dinosaur sites made famous by Roy Chapman Andrews and others. Otgo’s lab job paid roughly three hundred dollars a month. He was married, with a son who planned to go to college in Australia. A lot of people were taking side jobs as tour guides, and Otgo saw no problem with it. In his opinion, it was the government’s fault if scientists went freelance—employees should be paid enough to take care of their families and do their work. The paleontology center had existed for half a century, but its staff still couldn’t afford major solo expeditions in their own country. Mongolian research happened largely in collaboration with foreigners. “We need more scientists, more study, more money,” Otgo later said. “And government is not able.”

  To him, it seemed wrong to forbid tourists to pick up “lesser” fossils like random or damaged materials that paleontologists had passed over in their quest for something different or better. “In other countries everything is under control—regulations. Everything is described in the law. But in Mongolia it’s not,” Otgo said. “We are free people. If we want to collect anything, we collect it.” He remembered one eastern Gobi site loaded with petrified wood. “All the locals brought this petrified wood, every piece, for sale,” he said. “Now this forest disappeared. Now you can’t find any petrified wood in that place. It’s all brought to China.” He explained, “The locals don’t look at it from historical or scientific importance. They just think they have found some pieces, and they look at it as the source of money. They go, ‘Ah! I got a fortune now! I heard it gets great price! Can you ask your brother in the city how much it could be, or does he know any dealers who deals with this?’ Like maybe they say to someone, ‘I want to sell this bones,’ and the person maybe say to another person, ‘You know, I have seen bones,’ and the other person says, ‘Okay, wait, I will ask my brother or my relative.’ One by one.”

  He went on, “But really who is involved in this trade is rich people. Because dinosaurs are too big to go out through the borders, maybe some officials even can be involved, to get through customs, from both sides. Common people, they can’t do it.”

  To Otgo, Tuvshin appeared “prosperous.” He soon discovered that the businessman owned and lived in a mint-green building on Peace Avenue, in an apartment filled with minerals and geodes and an impressive collection of framed coins. By using his vacation days to work for Tuvshin, Otgo reckoned he could make a hundred dollars or more a day, plus all the vodka he could drink. He decided to make a demand: tourists must not take anything important. But if they wanted to pick up fossils that scientists didn’t want or need, so be it. “I’m not a policeman who can say, ‘You mustn’t do that,’” he later said. “I don’t have that right.”

  Figuring that Tuvshin would simply hire someone else if he turned him down, Otgo accepted the offer. But he kept the arrangement to himself, deciding that what he did on his own time was his business.

  CHAPTER 13

  “GO GOBI”

  ONCE ERIC KNEW THE NAME OF THE MONGOLIAN FOSSIL supplier, he wasted no time getting in touch. Tuvshinjargal sent friendly emails in response. He seemed to write just enough English that they could communicate, and from the way it sounded, he had half the Gobi at his disposal. Eric couldn’t tell whether “the Mongol” was working on behalf of someone else or if he was the top boss. He didn’t much care, as long as there were dinosaurs.

  Photo after photo of skeleton after skeleton arrived in Eric’s AOL inbox. Some were nearly whole and others were in parts—femurs in crates, vertebrae in black garbage bags, other bits still in situ, surrounded by brushes, chisels, glue bottles, and men’s sandaled feet. Other bones lay on laminate or concrete flooring, or on a blanket or tarp. Eric recognized Gallimimus, a small-headed, long-necked, ostrich-like meat eater, this one curled up in a field jacket, its legs overrunning the plaster. There was Oviraptor and Protocerat
ops. Saurolophus bones had been arranged in a lifelike floor puzzle, in more or less the correct anatomical order. One photo showed a set of therizinosaur hands pieced together on bare earth, a cigarette pack thrown in for scale; their size was staggering—Therizinosaurus had forelimbs and hands as disproportionately gigantic as T. bataar’s and T. rex’s were small. The middle claw measured 30 inches, nearly the length of a yardstick or a Major League Baseball bat.

  Eric was interested in a largely complete Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton—an upgrade, as he saw it, from the two skulls he had already done, and the closest he would probably ever come to T. rex. The United States was the only country where a commercial hunter could get a rex, but it was hard to do. First you had to own or lease property where a rex might be found; then you had to find one that was largely complete; then the bones had to be in good enough shape to restore. It took a lot of time and often a lot of money to find a T. rex, plus luck. (Roughly fifty rex skeletons have been unearthed, a decent showing in the fossil record.) Then it took time, money, and skill to prep and mount the specimen well enough to attract a serious buyer.

  Tuvshin made it easy, though. He was like a mail-order catalog for Gobi dinosaurs. He had started moving bones to the West via the Tucson and Tokyo shows. Hollis Butts, the dealer in Japan, remembered him carrying four to six “large travel roller bags or suitcases full of unprepared or partly prepared fossils, weighing a ton.” Tuvshin would fly anywhere, Butts said, “like a traveling salesman.”

  Around 2006, he switched to shipping containers. Certain dealers were eager to work with him, while others stayed away. As Tuvshin tried to legitimize his museum idea, “he was trying to get international people involved, and he was going to trade material,” another dealer later said. “It was always the idea to trade material from one museum to the next, so he could legally sell Mongolian materials.” Tuvshin carried a business card bearing the name of a private-museums association yet seemed “very secretive” about what he was doing. “I’d ask him a question about it and he’d feign that he didn’t understand English.”

  Eric knew it would cost a small fortune to become a client of Tuvshin’s, but the successful sale of the two T. bataar skulls had given him confidence. He told himself that if he didn’t buy Tuvshin’s dinosaurs, someone else would. He decided to go to Mongolia, even though it was October, that frenzied time between the Denver and Tucson shows, and Ulaanbaatar was a very long way to go. Mongolia was 7,000 miles away and thirteen hours ahead in time—Mongolia was literally the future.

  The easiest way to enter Mongolia has always been from the south. The plane from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar crosses 800 miles of Gobi. Nighttime is a surreal way to go in by air because the desert is even blacker than the ocean on a moonless night. Then a pinprick of a headlight may appear below, or the grid of a town may wink pinkly and disappear, as if transmitting a fleeting clue to dimension and scale. On summer days, if the weather is clear, one sees a swath of the whole terrestrial show—puckered brown terrain, a sheen of green, patches of redness where there’s iron in the earth. The crisscrossing dirt roads spider out to the horizon, converging here and there like the impact points of stones flung against a windshield. Because 30 percent of Mongolia’s current population of three million live in or around Ulaanbaatar, a person could travel for many miles in most of the rest of the country without ever seeing another human being. As Mike Novacek once put it, the Gobi is “one of the great empty spaces on earth.”

  Chinggis Khaan International Airport reminded Eric of a regional airport, like the one in Gainesville or St. Augustine. Tuvshin had promised to be waiting at customs. Eric looked for the nerdy, skinny man he had seen in the emailed photos, and when they spotted each other, Tuvshin motioned him to the front of the line, where a customs agent quickly stamped him through.

  At baggage claim, one of Tuvshin’s employees, a driver whose name Eric understood to be Ulzii, was waiting. They loaded the bags into Tuvshin’s Toyota Land Cruiser, then made the half-hour drive northeast, to the city. It excited Eric to be in a place he had never seen before, and though he tried to get an impression of Ulaanbaatar, all that registered was the wild traffic and ugly Soviet architecture. He had booked a cheap room at Seoul Hotel, in the city center, which turned out to be appended to a Korean restaurant and a strip club or massage parlor. Exhausted, he went straight to bed.

  The next morning, Tuvshin picked him up and drove him down Peace Avenue, the city’s main corridor. In places, Ulaanbaatar appeared to still be a faint mash-up of the ancient nomadic culture and Soviet uniformity, overlaid with newfound capitalism—an old temple next to a new apartment building, not far from a Louis Vuitton store or a Kenny Rogers Roasters. Nearly twenty years of a market economy had lined the street with restaurants, banks, cell phone stores, clothing shops, cashmere outlets, and nail salons. Before 1990, most Mongolians could not own cars, and they’d been making up for it ever since. Wrestling, archery, and horse racing are the nation’s three “manly” sports, but one of the bravest things a person can do in Mongolia is travel by motor vehicle or walk anywhere near traffic. The streets teemed with maniacal Kias and Hyundais; they tore past pedestrians, close enough to flip the hem of a coat.

  Much of Ulaanbaatar was paved, but plenty wasn’t. It was a really dusty town. Human street sweepers stood amid the madcap traffic, swiping at curbs with huge witchy broomsticks. The dirt only drifted and settled elsewhere. Land Cruisers were equipped with an “air snorkel” affixed alongside the windshield, an appendage that resembled a large vacuum cleaner accessory and protected the engine from dust and high water. Coal factory smokestacks spewed in the near distance, a visible reminder that in one of the world’s most polluted cities, the air quality was a felt presence on the tongue and in the lungs.

  Tuvshin arrived at a strip shopping center of four-story buildings fronted by a narrow parking lot and a bus stop. He parked around back, in a gravel lot, and led Eric up a few exterior stairs, through a rear door of his mint-green building. Inside, they climbed four flights of stairs and went into Tuvshin’s apartment, where he lived with his wife and children. Eric counted four bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus the kitchen and living spaces. There were aquariums and museum-quality collections of framed coins and natural history. Tuvshin’s travel business was on the same floor, at the front end of the building. His wife, whom Eric was invited to call Bobo, worked there. An older son was away at college in Japan; a teenage daughter and younger son lived at home, and spoke and wrote fluent English, whereas Tuvshin’s English was minimal. Eric estimated that Tuvshin and Bobo, who was slim, with straight, shoulder-length hair, were in their late forties. (In fact, Tuvshin was forty.)

  Tuvshin took Eric back outside and around to a basement door. Half the basement was a garage; the other half was a storage area filled with enough Gobi dinosaur skeletons to start a small standalone museum. When Eric started asking prices, Tuvshin, instead of answering him, put him back into the Land Cruiser and drove him out of the city.

  They were going north, maybe, Eric thought. Or east. It didn’t occur to him to feel nervous about traveling alone with a stranger to an unknown destination in an unfamiliar country where he spoke not one word of the language. As they passed through rolling grasslands, Tuvshin chain-smoked, and they chatted about Tuvshin’s father, who was Russian, and his sister, who lived in Germany. Eric gathered that Tuvshin traveled often and had a lot of girlfriends.

  They came to a small house in the countryside, in a kind of neighborhood—a summer house. The one-car garage contained more dinosaurs, plus display cases filled with rows of teeth and claws. Finally, Tuvshin was ready to name a price. The whole collection would cost $100,000.

  But the bones weren’t for sale! Tuvshin had promised them to another buyer. Eric asked him who but Tuvshin wouldn’t say. Mongolia was a long way to travel to be rebuffed—the Korean Air ticket alone had cost over $2,000—but Eric wasn’t angry. He had made his connection; now he would wait.

  Back in the
city, Tuvshin took Eric to the Natural History Museum. Online someone said the museum resembled an elementary school biology lab—“Honestly, if you’re not a paleontology junky, don’t go”—but Eric studied the mounts anyway. If Tuvshin agreed to sell him what he wanted, a T. bataar, the specimen would be the largest he had ever assembled.

  The mount is where engineering meets metalworking and scientific accuracy meets art. The AMNH preparator Amy Davidson, for instance, was a sculptor before becoming a preparator, and had worked season after season in the Gobi. There were no formal degrees or training programs in fossil preparation, but it helped to be patient and detail-oriented, and to have experience in professions that required nimble fingers, like dentistry, jewelry making, welding. Taking certain courses didn’t hurt—art conservation, anatomy, paleontology, vertebrate evolution, and geology were recommended—but there was “no substitute for aptitude and a genuine interest in preparation,” the AMNH pointed out. Prep work wasn’t a one-and-done job, either. Museums had been refurbishing exhibits to reflect new understandings of prehistoric biomechanics—T. rex is now shown not as an upright, tail-dragging sluggard but rather as a dynamic hunter whose body stood almost horizontally, the long tail outstretched to counterbalance the enormous head.

  Eric would need to weld a large steel frame in a realistic pose. The bones would need to be removable, as he had seen done in Western museums. The armature, which might include plates, bolts, screws, posts, and wire, had to be strong enough to hold fossils that weighed hundreds of pounds yet graceful enough to disappear. Early dinosaur preparators often mounted skeletons by running steel rods up the hollow bones or by drilling holes in the fossils, yet embedded in the work was a “bona fide hidden metals craft,” as one Carnegie Museum project manager once put it. Phil Fraley, who built or rebuilt some of the world’s top dinosaur exhibits, once said, “Really, what an armature is doing is replacing all the tendons and ligaments—the soft tissue that used to hold the animal together.” The best preparators created mounts so realistic that even the naked scaffolding evoked an impression of life. Siobhan Starrs, a Smithsonian exhibit developer, found early dinosaur framework so beautiful that she had always wanted to make an exhibit consisting solely of armature.