The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  Duria Antiquior was the first attempt at a scientific scene depicting deep time. De La Beche commissioned hand-colored lithographic prints and sold them to friends and scientists, giving Mary and her mother the proceeds. Teachers later enlarged the piece and used it in classrooms, allowing Mary’s influence to endure as an inspiration for early scientific illustration.

  In October 1833, a cliff came sloughing down, barely missing Mary but killing her beloved terrier, Tray. Five years later, more bad luck: she invested her life’s savings, about 200 pounds, with a “gentleman” who died suddenly, leaving her broke. Mary, now forty, found herself “reduced to straitened circumstances” once again, the Dorset County Chronicle reported, “while her health was impaired from the hardships which she had exposed herself, and the distress of mind consequent on her loss.”

  This time it was William Buckland who stepped in to help, persuading the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the British government, to award Mary what was known as a civil list pension, for her “many contributions to the science of geology.” She would receive an annual income of 25 pounds, providing for her and her mother. Molly Anning lived to see her daughter receive the honor, but died shortly thereafter, leaving Mary alone for the first time in her life.

  But Mary pressed on. When King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited Lyme and bought a six-foot-long Ichthyosaurus at Anning’s Fossil Depot, Mary signed her name in his physician’s book, informing him, “I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.”

  On March 9, 1847, just before her forty-eighth birthday, Mary died of breast cancer after suffering with the disease for a year. Her brother had died some time earlier, and she was buried near him in the St. Michael’s Parish churchyard on a high hill overlooking the sea. Henry De La Beche, soon to be knighted, sent a stained-glass window from London to the vicar of Lyme, to be installed at the church in Mary’s honor. At a Royal Society gathering in London, De La Beche read aloud a eulogy—the first to honor a non-member or a woman—hailing Mary Anning as someone “who though not placed among even the easier classes of society but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge.”

  On Cockmoile Square, a redbrick museum eventually went up on the spot where the Annings first lived. What’s now known as the Lyme Regis Museum stood three stories tall, overlooking Lyme Bay. For years the museum housed a cramped memorial to Mary Anning at the top of a winding staircase. The room consisted of an aisle flanked by glass cabinets filled with fossils. Inside a case at the back of the room hung photographs of the vocational heirs of Mary Anning, the latest generation of Jurassic Coast fossil hunters. Among them was Eric Prokopi’s new business partner, Chris Moore.

  Black Ven, the name of the towering cliff at Charmouth, sounds like a Marvel Comics character and consists of the thready, dark marls that Mary Anning called “beef.” English law allowed hunters to collect whatever they wanted as long as they notified the authorities of potentially important finds, in case the crown wanted to buy them. Government officials in jackets inscribed with FOSSIL WARDEN patrolled the beach, mostly to answer tourists’ questions and keep them safe, for twice in recorded history massive sections of the cliff have collapsed into the sea. Black Ven—and the rest of the Jurassic Coast, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site—is one of the least stable stretches of geology on the planet.

  Chris Moore found Charmouth in 1968, as a boy on holiday with his family from the northern town of Manchester. Wherever Moore’s family vacationed, he hunted fossils—an uncle, a teacher, had inspired his interest—but the Jurassic Coast was the place to be. After moving to Charmouth in the late 1970s, he earned a living as a boat builder and hunted fossils in his off hours, prepping them in his garden shed. In 1991, Moore sold part of his collection and established Forge Fossils, a commercial hunting and prep business headquartered in an old potter’s space on Charmouth’s main village road, The Street. The company stationery featured the image of an ammonite, a fossil nearly as ubiquitous to the Jurassic Coast as shark teeth were to Venice, Florida. Sir David Attenborough, Great Britain’s most beloved naturalist, once called Forge Fossils a “delightful shop.”

  Moore was a tallish, weathered Englishman with dark hair and a graying beard; other dealers at Tucson and Denver knew him as an affable vendor who traded in excellent fossils. His best finds included a 3-D ichthyosaur and a huge slab of ammonites now in the permanent collection of Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science. He discovered two new species of ichthyosaur, one of which was named for him, Leptonectes moorei. But Moore’s favorite finds were in storage, including another ichthyosaur species, plus, according to one news report, a “complete fossil shark, an eight-food slab of crinoids, and an enormous ichthyosaur head.” While his portrait graced the Mary Anning wall in Lyme, Moore’s real goal was to open a museum of Jurassic Coast fossils. Remarkably, one does not exist.

  Around September 2009, not long after Eric’s second trip to Mongolia, Moore and his son, Alex, were featured in “Paleontology in Charmouth,” a Shoreline newsletter package marking the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Lately, Moore had been working on a “stunning” group of symmetrical crinoids in limestone, telling a reporter, “I always wanted to put fossils in a different environment, to display them as natural sculptures, which, to my mind, they are.” Soon, he would have a workshop full of Gobi Desert dinosaurs.

  Eric and Moore barely knew each other, but they had friends in common. Vendors often partnered up to do deals, so it wasn’t unusual for them to connect. Eric was happy to work with Moore because he had been in the business forever and had a good reputation, and because their gambit seemed easy enough.

  When Eric learned that the Mongolian delivery had cleared customs in the United Kingdom, he flew to London and took a train south to Dorset. Moore picked him up at Axminster station and drove him to his home, Askew House, a shabbily grand Victorian at a bend in the road, behind a high box hedge and gate, just up the hill from Forge Fossils. To accommodate the new batch of Gobi fossils, Moore had rented a workshop outside of Charmouth, at Befferlands Farm, a cluster of one-story buildings with terra-cotta roof tiles, on a leafy, narrow lane named Berne. The largest of the structures was used for boat building. In the next building were the offices of a tour guide and author named Nigel Clarke, who led Lyme Regis fossil walks and self-published pocket-size tide reports and paperback guides such as Mary Anning 1799–1847: A Life on the Rocks. Moore worked in the same building, in a room filled with unprepped ammonites and, now, Mongolian fossils and gers.

  Eric and Moore decided to split the bone inventory by value. They assigned each specimen a dollar amount: twenty-five grand for a Protoceratops skeleton and so forth. Moore made two columns on notebook paper and they flipped a coin to see who would choose first. Moore won. They started choosing:

  Eric: BIG TARB 25

  Chris*: PROT 25

  Eric: TRAB SKULL 15

  Chris*: ANK 24

  Eric: PLACY 8

  Chris*: DUCK 8

  Eric: ANK 22

  Chris*: HAD 6

  Eric: TURT 4

  Chris*:

  Eric: TRAB 5

  Chris*:

  “TURT” was a slab of turtles. “HAD” was a largely complete hadrosaur. “DUCK” wasn’t necessarily a duckbill. “It was this complete little dinosaur that had this duckbill on it,” Eric later said. “I think it ended up being something that we didn’t know what it was.” They went round after round—OVIR, EGG NEST, LEGS. As he made the list, Moore often transposed letters—TRAB for TARB. Afterward, they swapped some items around.

  One skeleton they decided to share: that of a large and nearly complete Tarbosaurus bataar.

  By late February 2010, Eric either owned or was expecting more valuable fossils than he had ever possessed or even seen at one time outside a natural history museum or trade show. The garage at Serenola overflowed with inventory, P
leistocene to Cretaceous, Florida to Mongolia, with more en route from Tuvshin by way of the Jurassic Coast of England. It wasn’t unusual for Amanda to come home and find an Oviraptor leg mounted on the kitchen counter or a giant ground sloth towering inside the front door.

  The Serenola renovations were not paid for, but they were done. The front room was outfitted with a red leather sofa, skins from Tucson, and the “grown-up rugs” Eric and Amanda had bought in Richmond after the sale of the fossil they now thought of as the Nicolas Cage skull. Built-in shelves with tall glass doors flanked Tom Petty’s grandmother’s salvaged mantel. The dining room table, another Tucson find, was made of vintage champagne barrels. A tall antique case of glass and oak that once displayed department store wedding dresses now stood near the front door, filled with fossils and casts. Amanda had painted the rooms in muted greens, yellows, and grays, with names like “Mineral Deposit” and “Mountain Smoke.” The Gainesville Sun published a large feature on Serenola’s transformation, the writer mentioning Eric’s fossil-collecting travels to Mongolia and other countries. “A home is more than just filling a place with furniture,” Amanda liked to say. “Your home should tell a story.”

  The renovation of Serenola had cost more than Eric and Amanda had expected. When the fossil shipment arrived from Charmouth in late March, the Prokopis were well over $400,000 in debt, with dinosaurs as their prospective way out. The customs forms listed the import’s “manufacturer” as Forge Fossils, the contents as “fossils,” the value as $15,000, and the country of origin as England. An itemized commercial invoice read—

  2 large rough (unprepared) fossil reptile heads

  6 boxes of broken fossil bones

  3 rough (unprepared) fossil reptiles

  1 fossil reptile skull

  Eric still owed Tuvshin part of the $250,000 overall payment for the dinosaurs, but he went on ordering.

  Hollis Butts, the dealer in Japan, resurfaced, suddenly suggesting that he and Eric partner up. Now that Eric was buying directly from Tuvshin, Butts suspected Tuvshin of “playing both sides” to generate a bidding war. Eric humored Butts by email, telling him, “I was happy buying from you. You just wouldn’t sell to me anymore, that’s why I started going direct.”

  Butts, who liked beginning his emails with “Greetings,” replied, “Greetings.” He wished to explain what had happened. One winter, he had sent Tuvshin $30,000, then $20,000, then another twenty, because Tuvshin said he needed money “badly.” Eric’s decision to travel to Mongolia in the summer of 2009 had presented a problem for Tuvshin: if Tuvshin sent Butts a container, he wouldn’t have anything left over for Eric. Butts figured that Tuvshin had given Eric his container and compensated him with a couple of skulls. “In that way, he kept my money and a lot of yours,” Butts told Eric.

  The whole enterprise felt shaky, did it not? Had Eric never wondered why Tuvshin was always out of money, even when he’d been paid thousands? “He does not like the fossil business. It is very risky,” Butts told him. “He is involved in various other businesses and finances it with fossil money.” In the early days Tuvshin would simply send shipments; now he was “pushing for the customer to visit and buy,” Butts went on. “This is so that if there is trouble, he can say that he knows the buyer but is not really involved in the business. ‘The foreigner came and bought fossils from people.’” Butts added, “It is a safety net that worries me.”

  Butts proposed that Eric tell Tuvshin he no longer needed fossils because his clients had backed out. “This should give him a shock and keep prices low.” He proposed a scheme that called for everything to go through Japan, “giving nobody else a chance.” Butts said, “For Tuvshin, the more buyers the merrier but that works against us both and I think we should try to get everything.”

  One problem with Tuvshin, though: he was unpredictable. Eric was supposed to have seen him recently at Tucson, but Tuvshin never showed, never answered his phone; Tuvshin later emailed Eric a photo of blistered bare feet, saying he’d gotten too drunk on the flight from Mongolia and had wandered around barefoot in L.A. before he could figure out what to do. Often, he was unreachable for days or weeks. Butts said, “My fear is always that he has been arrested.”

  Tuvshin had gone dark this time probably because Butts hadn’t sent money that Tuvshin expected. “I often feel like I am his bank,” Butts told Eric. He’d considered “sending off a few emails that would bring his whole business to a sudden end,” he added. “But that wouldn’t help me.” Butts had four guesses about Tuvshin’s most recent disappearance: “Summer is a busy time when specimens are turning up so he is out gathering things OR he actually is in trouble OR he has an order from another buyer and is going to screw us both OR he is having trouble arranging shipping.” Butts’s other concern was Eric’s new partnership with “the Brits.” “Any chance they are now buying directly from Tuvshin, now that you have shown them how?” he asked.

  Eric tried to keep the conversation neutral. He changed the subject to a Microraptor he had ordered through dealers he knew from Tucson. Customs had intercepted the fossil, and while Eric had briefly fought the confiscation, he’d ultimately surrendered. “US customs has been holding a lot of fossil shipments lately, and are demanding species lists and proof of origin,” he told Butts. “I don’t know what is going on but it is troubling.”

  Occasionally some of these cases made the news. On Christmas Eve 2007, a customs officer in Chicago had X-rayed express-mail shipments of “shoes” and “gifts” from China and found a fossil saber-tooth cat and the skulls of Chinese dinosaurs. In Virginia, a traveler tried to bring twenty-four dinosaur eggs through Dulles International Airport on a flight from Japan without proper papers. In Los Angeles, federal agents confiscated what had been advertised as a Chinese Oviraptor egg nest with visible embryos after it sold for over $420,000 at a Bonhams & Butterfields auction. The nest was a forgery: the seller had purchased the eggs separately, implanted them in a slab of imported sandstone, and advertised them as having been lain by a single creature. After the dealer declined to contest the seizure, the eggs were repatriated. Challenged by law enforcement, the dealer had walked away. Mostly, though, illicit fossils got through. At one point an ICE official told the media, “Fossils are a niche within a niche when it comes to customs enforcement.”

  Butts told Eric, “One thing is clear: You need to avoid Chinese and Argentine fossils. I wouldn’t touch either.”

  Distrusting Butts, Eric had lied about Tuvshin—they had been in contact all along. “Do you have more photos?” he emailed Tuvshin one day in late September 2010. “Do you need more money?”

  “We might find two of the things you want,” Tuvshin replied. The diggers were working in the Gobi as he spoke. “We have many Ovi, Proto, and Gali,” Tuvshin told Eric. “We need money so much.”

  The Prokopis now owned a long, goose-necked cargo trailer, a Ford F550 truck, and a flat-bottomed boat, even though Eric rarely hunted in rivers anymore. Amanda drove a Lexus SUV with a leather interior. They took out another line of credit via a wraparound mortgage while also owing some $60,000 on Bank of America credit cards, nearly $20,000 on a Capital One card, over $15,000 in federal income tax, and more than $533,000 on real estate. Their overall monthly minimum payments exceeded $7,000, with finance charges piling up. Their bank account held $55 one minute, $100,000 the next. Then in February, Amanda had to be temporarily hospitalized with what they worried was meningitis, and more charges accumulated.

  By April, Eric had a long list from Tuvshin of the dinosaur parts he could soon expect:

  1st box: big Hadrosaur head

  2nd box: big Hadrosaur neck, big Hadrosaur half tail

  3: 2 ovirators [sic], 1 red protoceratops

  4: big Hadro left feet

  5: big Hadro right feet…

  There were seventeen boxes in all. Seeing that he needed a larger work space, Eric ordered a prefabricated warehouse and installed it beyond the swimming pool. The building came with a fifty-year gua
rantee—Eric would be eighty-seven when the warranty ran out. He sent another $90,000 to Tuvshin for this latest batch of dinosaurs, and was told the fossils were being prepared for shipment.

  Weeks later, on June 24, Eric opened a new email from Tuvshin.

  Only it wasn’t from Tuvshin.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE LAST DINOSAUR

  “I FEEL VERY SORRY TO CONVEY YOU THIS MESSAGE THAT MY husband Mr. Tuvshinjargal Maam has passed away.”

  Eric reread the email.

  Tuvshin was dead?

  The email was from Bobo, who said Tuvshin had died the previous night, of “sudden lung failure,” after a monthlong illness. The email provided no further information but read, “I am very thankful for your friendship, hard-work [sic], and support in the past. I am looking forward to contact you. I pray to god that, ‘May his soul rest in peace.’” Eric immediately forwarded the email to Chris Moore in England, writing, “Very Bad news!”

  The latest $90,000 that Eric had paid Tuvshin had cleared, but the new batch of bones hadn’t shipped. After a couple of weeks passed without word from Mongolia, Eric emailed Bobo, saying, “I hope you are doing ok with the circumstances. I am eager to get our business sorted out.”

  But the only thing to do was to go to Mongolia in person. Eric and Moore booked flights, Eric letting Bobo know he would arrive on the night of July 22. Hoping to meet the next morning, he told her, “Chris Moore will be coming also. He is my partner in this business and has sent money also.” As Eric understood it, five crates were already packed and waiting in a warehouse, and another order was outstanding. Mentioning customs, he said, “Maybe you can use the same person as before.”