The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  Three days later, Eric was back in Ulaanbaatar, sharing a room with Moore at the Guide House Hotel, where the presidential suite rented for $95 a night. At Tuvshin’s apartment they expressed their condolences to the family. Eric found the whole situation awkward; he didn’t know Tuvshin well enough to grieve him, and he didn’t know Tuvshin’s family well enough to gauge the depth of everyone’s suffering. He found it odd that no one wanted to talk about the illness and death, but attributed it to Mongolian custom. What was “sudden lung failure,” anyway? A heart attack? Lung cancer? Later, when Eric told his friend Tony about it, they made a macabre joke that, given Tuvshin’s various interests, sudden lung failure might mean a pillow to the face. The suddenness of the death seemed odd considering Tuvshin’s age—he had just turned forty-three. Eric couldn’t make out whether he’d been hospitalized or buried or given a funeral or what. He asked no questions, though. He wanted to pay his respects, get the dinosaurs he’d paid for, and go home.

  After Eric and Moore were assured of their shipment, the family took everyone sightseeing. Moore had never been to Mongolia, and before long he was being driven out to the big Chinggis statue in the countryside and learning falconry. Otgo, the chief prepper at the national paleontology lab, joined them at a park for a picnic, as did a customs agent. Within five days, Eric had come and gone from Ulaanbaatar for the third, and last, time.

  None of this felt very interesting or exciting anymore, and not just because Tuvshin was dead. The stress had been getting to him for some time. Amanda had noticed that lately, Eric had been drinking too much and acting silly at parties—flirting with her girlfriends, throwing people into the pool. It wasn’t like him. Life had become too little about what had drawn Eric to fossils in the first place. He imagined prepping out the rest of the Tuvshin inventory and being done with Mongolia. Maybe he would find some ranch land out West and hunt dinosaurs there. Maybe he would go back to rivers.

  For years, lawmakers’ attempts to regulate fossil collecting had failed, one after another, but in January 2009 a legislative package called the Omnibus Public Land Management Act had passed the Senate. An omnibus bill is sort of a catchall for a range of legislation. This package consisted of one hundred and fifty-nine bills touching on everything from improvements in rehab treatments for paralyzed Americans to extra lab space at the Smithsonian. Most of it, though, involved nature—the monitoring of ocean acidification, the reimbursement of Native American ranchers whose livestock got eaten by wolves. The Act sought to advance conservation in nearly every state by protecting thousands of miles of rivers and trails; designating millions of federal acres as wilderness; establishing a new national monument in southern New Mexico, an important area for Paleozoic footprints; and providing for better care of national lands that already existed, such as Idaho’s Owyhee Canyons, Utah’s Zion National Park, and Virginia’s “wilderness-quality” forests.

  The omnibus package included the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act, which provided for the first uniform protection of fossils on public lands. Anyone convicted of selling fossils found on federal property could be imprisoned for up to five years, and after two or more convictions the penalties could be doubled. Moreover, everyone would need a permit from the Department of the Interior in order to collect vertebrate fossils and other materials deemed “scientifically important” on public property; permits would be issued only to accredited scientists and affiliates of a museum or school, and never to anyone collecting for commercial purposes. Casual collecting of “surface” fossils without a permit was deemed okay in some instances and areas. Some thought the legislation brought necessary and overdue toughness, and others felt it went too far. Commercial hunters had never been allowed to collect vertebrates on federal property, yet bristled at seeing the restrictions so strongly codified. Tracie Bennitt, president of AAPS, the commercial trade group, had written an open letter to Congress on behalf of her colleagues, arguing against the legislation. Noting that the Act called for the management and protection of paleontological resources using “scientific principles and expertise,” she had pointed out that some hunters already abided by such practices, writing, “Amateurs are the foot soldiers of paleontology and their activities are to be encouraged.” The bill neglected to address the idea that commercial collecting on public lands could benefit paleontology and society if only everyone would work together, she had complained: “Wouldn’t this be a better alternative than fossils disappearing from the world forever?”

  One aspect of the new law had angered both sides of the debate between paleontologists and commercial hunters. Without the interior secretary’s written permission, scientists working on federal property weren’t allowed to publish the locations of their finds. The measure was intended to thwart poachers but ran counter to the idea of open science. Paleontologists’ research had long included site specifics, down to latitude and longitude; banning the release of that information was seen as tantamount to hiding data.

  It had appeared impossible to please everyone. Policymakers had struggled to find a place for reputable commercial hunters without empowering a side-flood of venal yahoos who only wanted to rip at the earth like gold diggers. That was the gap that no one had figured out—and that some never wanted to figure out—even as President Barack Obama had signed the PRPA into law in the spring of 2009.

  For now, Eric intended to concentrate on the fossils already in his possession, including the T. bataar that he shared with Moore. It wasn’t the largest skeleton in stock, but it was one of the most visually promising. A T. rex requires twenty thousand hours of prep, it’s been said, but by the time Eric started working on the bataar, it was late 2011 and Tucson was fast approaching. To help with the workload, he and Amanda hired a couple of assistants, including Tyler Guynn, a chipper divorcée and single mom in her thirties with dark eyes, an olive complexion, a husky voice, and short, chestnut hair lightly streaked with gold. A military kid, she had grown up partly in Germany but her accent and colloquialisms—“dang it” and “darlin’” and “kiss my grits” and “bless her bones”—were all Florida by way of Georgia. She had worked in roofing sales and bartending, and recently she’d gotten interested in both anthropology and photography, which eventually had led her to work for the Prokopis. Eric had set her up at a table in the workshop and showed her how to prep. They worked eight, ten hours a day together, often well into the night, with the bays open and the industrial fans whirring. Tyler had been getting tattoos since she was a teenager—an all-seeing ankle eye, lower-back butterflies, a compass, a peacock feather, a phoenix. As the days passed, she chose a bare spot on her left pelvis and added the large skull of Tarbosaurus bataar.

  The bones were crumbly, and as the matrix fell away Eric strengthened them with PaleoBOND, a liquid hardener. If a piece was missing, he dug around in his inventory and filled in with random fossils from other specimens. Otherwise he sculpted the replacement with epoxy, or bought cast Gorgosaurus parts from the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota. Once all the bones were ready, he placed them in the correct anatomical shape on the workshop floor, like a puzzle, the dinosaur curled loosely at his feet like a sleeping dog. Eric’s friend Tony climbed a ladder and shot a photo of Eric kneeling at the snout, hands on hips, smiling up at the camera. “Here is our Tyrannosaurus skeleton. Almost finished!” Amanda posted on Facebook. A friend asked, “If the crab went for 12,500 whats the starting price of a tyrannosaurus????”

  Eric didn’t have time to mount the skeleton, so he displayed parts of it on a table at Tucson. Other dealers came around to see it, thinking Eric Prokopi was either the bravest or most reckless son of a bitch they had ever seen. The trade in Mongolian dinosaurs so far had been “up to and including skulls,” Mike Triebold, a well-respected commercial hunter from Colorado, later said. But this was “a big, whole T. rex–y skeleton. This is a big, sexy dinosaur.”

  The market appeared primed for big, sexy dinosaurs, to paleontologists’ continuing dismay. “Luxu
ry Market for Dinosaur Remains Thrives,” the Huffington Post announced, declaring dinosaurs the “newest hot art objects.” Yet despite Eric’s hopes of selling the T. bataar to a foreign museum, the skeleton failed to sell at Tucson at all.

  Natural history now went to auction every spring and fall in the United States. Houses had embraced the category as a promising new revenue stream. Eric, who had been selling items through I.M. Chait and other auction companies, decided to mount the T. bataar and consign it to one of the upcoming events of spring 2012.

  A giant ground sloth was the largest and most complicated skeleton he had ever assembled, and the only major dinosaur piece he had worked on start to finish was the tarbosaur skull he had installed in Los Angeles at the house he believed belonged to Leonardo DiCaprio. There was no blueprint he could download, no YouTube channel that offered joint-by-bone instructions on assembling a Cretaceous dinosaur. Doing his own research, he downloaded scientific sketches along with photos of Tyrannosaurus Stan, a Harding County specimen found by Stan Sacrison, and illustrations of AMNH 973, the T. rex holotype, which the American Museum of Natural History had sold to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in the 1940s. “Tarbofootpathological,” he slugged an image of tyrannosaur feet. “SUEskeletonSide,” he slugged an image of Tyrannosaurus Sue.

  A thousand things could go wrong on a mount this large. A pelvis alone can weigh over 3,000 pounds. Simply moving a fossil can fracture it. Skulls have been dropped and shattered. Bolts can produce stress fractures. Metallurgical errors can corrupt the integrity of the welds. If the engineering is off, a skeleton can fall with enough mass and force to crush whatever—or whomever—happens to be in its way.

  Eric bought the best steel rebar he could find and fired up his welder. For the base he made three steel floor plates, each about 16 inches square, and a fourth plate a little smaller. In the center of each of the three big plates, he added an upright attachment that resembled a large dart sitting on its flight. A steel rod ran straight up from each of the darts, connecting to a frame. Eric shaped each piece of the armature to suggest, overall, a dinosaur in motion, then spray-painted the entire structure a sandy color, to blend in with the Gobi bones.

  The skull is the most important piece of any skeleton. The skull helps paleontologists identify a species and provides important clues about traits such as brain size and eating habits. Aesthetically, the skull is the centerpiece. Assembled, this one measured 4 feet long and weighed so much that Eric had to hoist it with a forklift. As he edged the head into place he realized he had miscalculated angle relative to weight—once the hoist fell away, the dinosaur would tip. He made adjustments and reinforcements and tried again. As he withdrew the ropes, the skull held. The ribs held. The vertebrae held. The femurs and tibias held. Snout to tail, all 24 feet of the skeleton held. It has been said that it is most natural to pose T. rex hands as if the creature were “holding a basketball—or someone’s head—between them,” and while Eric had never heard that idea, that’s what he’d done. Jaws open, legs in motion, the tarbosaur appeared to be chasing prey. It stood facing the open bays of the workshop as if frozen in the act of dashing out into the Florida sunshine and down the driveway of Serenola.

  Eric offered the T. bataar to Tom Lindgren at Bonhams. Lindgren had sold Mongolian fossils, and had been the one to connect Eric with Tuvshin, but he and the German dealer Andreas Guhr had gone to court in California over a co-owned T. bataar skull, eventually agreeing to sell it to “Buyer X” through I.M. Chait for $330,000, and now Lindgren wanted nothing more to do with Gobi fossils. Ever since the death of Tuvshin, the very mention of Mongolian dinosaurs made him go quiet and white. So Eric offered the skeleton to David Herskowitz.

  Herskowitz now worked for Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, which was poised to sell $800 million worth of collectibles that year. Heritage hosted five hundred auctions annually and claimed 750,000 online bidder-members in nearly two hundred countries. Celebrity clients included Whoopi Goldberg, NASA astronauts, and the estates of Buddy Holly, Ava Gardner, and Malcolm Forbes. Recently, and controversially, Herskowitz had sold a “fighting pair” of Wyoming dinosaurs named Fantasia (a Stegosaurus) and Dracula (an Allosaurus). Herskowitz’s old mentor Henry Galiano had found the skeletons in the Dana Quarry, near the town of Ten Sleep, in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains. The dinosaurs had been advertised as having died mid-combat, not unlike the famous fighting pair of Mongolia. They had sold for $2.7 million to an undisclosed museum in an undisclosed country in the Middle East and had never been seen since.

  The Wyoming dinosaurs had put Herskowitz at the head of a short list of natural history brokers who specialized in major dinosaurs and sales. He wanted to build out this category for Heritage, and he believed the New York City auction he was planning for May 20, with the T. bataar as the star attraction, would prove the power of natural history to stand alone. As he promoted the sale in the media, Herskowitz called the skeleton an “impeccably preserved specimen of the sort that is almost never seen on the open market.”

  Now, though, as the auction proceeded, Mongolia was asking questions, eager to know how an entire Gobi Desert dinosaur had wound up at a New York City sale. Eric paced the beach at St. Augustine, staying in close contact with Herskowitz, Chris Moore, and Heritage’s cofounder and CEO, Jim Halperin, about whether to go forward now that the president of Mongolia was getting involved.

  By phone and email Heritage continually deferred to the sellers—there was still time for Eric and Moore to back out. Eric liked none of his options. If he pulled the dinosaur from the auction, he stood to lose both the money he had paid Tuvshin and much-needed income. If he proceeded, the situation with Mongolia might get worse. To him, it seemed unlikely that President Elbegdorj had true legal reach, but he decided not to risk it. He told Halperin, “After discussing it with Chris, we have decided to pull the tyrannosaurus from the auction.”

  Then he spent the next two hours doubting himself. As the auction got under way, he emailed Heritage and said he’d changed his mind—a decision that would become the line of demarcation between a life relatively free of serious drama and his new, increasingly complicated one.

  Bolor Minjin, the Mongolian paleontologist who had alerted her native government to the T. bataar auction, had returned home every summer while working on her doctorate in New York. At first, she participated in joint AMNH-Mongolian expeditions, delighted to conduct fieldwork in her own country, on Gobi fossils. Early on, she met a young paleontologist named Jonathan Geisler, a South Carolinian pursuing a doctorate at Columbia University, and they got married. Geisler worked on cetaceans—whales, porpoises, dolphins—and Bolor on Paleogene multituberculates, early mammals no larger than a rat. Bolor impressed her American and Mongolian colleagues as a skilled collector and passionate paleontology advocate as she sought to prove herself as a scientist.

  In May 2000, as she pursued her PhD, a major exhibition went up at the American Museum, called “Fighting Dinosaurs: New Discoveries from Mongolia.” The exhibition featured the stunning “fighting pair” found by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, one of Bolor’s heroes. The crowds were so large that the museum had to admit people by timed entry. “More original, brand new fossils per square inch than I’ve ever seen before,” one dinosaur enthusiast told members of a vertebrate paleontology email list.

  Rinchen Barsbold, the elder statesman of Mongolian paleontology, flew to New York for the occasion. Bolor was thrilled to be invited to a luncheon honoring him, and even more thrilled to find herself seated next to him. Here was a Gobi theropod expert who had advanced the understanding of dinosaur evolution in Eurasia; who had early on ascribed to the idea that birds descended from dinosaurs; and who had described a host of dinosaurs, including Gallimimus and the family Oviraptoridae. Bolor anticipated a meaningful conversation, hoping the older scientist would offer career advice and support. She had chosen mammals only because her father had waved her off dinosaurs, just as he had chosen invertebrates because he had been w
aved off vertebrates, as if there wasn’t room in the world for more than one Mongolian expert on Gobi Desert dinosaurs. Bolor wasn’t surprised to hear Barsbold discourage her interest in dinosaurs, but it shocked her to hear him discourage her interest in paleontology by calling it a field with “no future.” She wondered if scientists of Barsbold’s generation felt embittered by delayed recognition and a lack of public interest—Mongolia had a National Geologists Day, but no National Paleontologists Day.

  Undeterred, Bolor went on to participate in Gobi projects with her husband and her father and, at one point, Jack Horner, a burly native Montanan who had dropped out of college because of severe dyslexia but whose dinosaur research had earned him a MacArthur “genius” grant. Few names in paleontology were more widely known than Horner’s. He was credited with finding the first dinosaur eggs of North America, a discovery that happened because a Montana hunter and rock-shop owner named Marion Brandvold had shown him some tiny bones she had been keeping in a coffee can. Horner had published books and served as a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movies, and by the time Bolor met him, he was teaching in the honors college at Montana State University and curating the school’s Museum of the Rockies. Pursuing projects on developmental biology, Horner sought as many specimens of a single dinosaur species as he could get, and the Gobi appeared to be the place to find them.

  Bolor joined Horner in the field in 2005, and again the next year, when the team reported finding sixty-seven dinosaurs in one week. As Horner saw it, Mongolian paleontology had two key problems. One, the country needed to develop its next generation of paleontologists and facilities. “Dinosaurs are the one thing to see when you come to Mongolia”—the Natural History Museum should be the best show in town, he told Discover magazine. Two, Gobi dinosaur poaching had reached a crisis point. “Smugglers have gotten so bold that they’ve taken specimens right off the dig sites while paleontologists break for lunch,” he said, adding, “There’s no control here, and no regulation for digging here.”