The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  The monotony set in pretty fast. Up at six. Back to bed. Long walk around the track. Lunch. Nap. Volleyball. Watch Captain Phillips on DVD in the library. Watch Superman. Walk five laps around the track. Draw animal anagrams for the kids—

  Giraffe

  Rat

  Emu

  Yak

  Snake

  Owl

  Narwhal

  Rooster

  Ibex

  Viper

  Eel

  Ray

  Spider

  On the ninth day, he ran a lap, then a mile, then two. He started drinking hot tea. On the twelfth day, he got his job assignment, working the morning shift in the cafeteria. By now, he knew that dried mackerels, from the commissary, were currency because they were protein, and that one mackerel equaled a dollar. One mackerel paid a guy to do your laundry for a week. On the eighteenth day, Amanda came to visit but it was awkward and she never came again.

  He kept a prison diary—laundry, noisy guards, “great apple muffin.” “Beat Carlito in arm wrestling.” “Started playing flag football.” “Felt sad all day so no exercise.” “I can’t seem to not eat tons of carbs here.” In October he made Amanda and the kids a Halloween card of plain white paper and autumn leaves he’d collected on the prison grounds, laminated with clear packing tape. In a letter he said he was “fantasizing about doing some things as a family.” Maybe they could go to Florida after Christmas and see his parents, or to Gainesville to see their old friends. Maybe SeaWorld, to show the kids where Amanda used to work. Maybe Northern California, for spring break. “I loved that trip and want to show our kids so much and take them to see the world,” he wrote. He had come across a boating magazine in prison and was amazed by the different kinds of sailboats you could live on. How cool it would be, to “just go.”

  As Amanda and the kids went on with their autumn, she realized she had been having “Lifetime Movie fantasies” about getting back together with Eric. It wouldn’t work. And maybe she didn’t want it to. Right now all she wanted was to rebuild her credit, pay bills, and find a “cozy nest” that she could afford on her own. During an otherwise abysmal period of online dating, she had met a sweet army guy and father of four named George Bryan. She loved her job at Jackson Thomas Interiors, where she specialized in staging houses. For the first time in a while, her life felt somewhat stable, and she wanted to see where it would go.

  One day, she received a thickish envelope in the mail, with no return address. Folded into a blank sheet of paper were two long, thin pieces of cardboard pressed together. Opening the lengths of cardboard like a book, she found crudely cut, oval indentions. Nestled into each indention was a flat object wrapped in toilet tissue. Peeling back the toilet tissue, she saw Indian arrowheads. Right then she knew that if Eric could manage to find arrowheads while in prison, he would never stop hunting treasure.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE DINOSAUR BUS

  BOLOR MINJIN WANTED TO KNOW WHO HAD DUG THE FAMOUS Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton, and where. “Like, the hole.”

  Any paleontologist knew it was impossible to match a specific fossil to a specific hole in the ground, even within a geological formation as signature as the Nemegt. If a poacher did admit to being the digger, he would almost certainly be winging it, or lying. A range of clues would surface the discrepancies, not least of which was the fact that the million-dollar dinosaur was not one creature, but rather an amalgam of various skeletons, as had been revealed in court. Still, Bolor wanted details. Then again, she didn’t. She had reservations about nosing around in criminal matters, and she certainty did not want her fellow Mongolians wrongly assuming her a snitch. Anyway, she had found another way to combat dinosaur poaching, and in the summer of 2015 she went home to Mongolia to try it.

  As July gave way to a blistering August, she settled in with her mother. One Friday morning she dressed in army green capris, a pink T-shirt, and a long-sleeved plaid shirt, a Spinosaurus pin affixed to her drab-olive Baggallini purse. Her father had died recently, in Virginia, where Bolor’s sister lived, of pancreatic cancer. Bolor was using his cell phone case, his Canon camera, and his car, which he had trimmed with padded seats and a cloth steering wheel, a sky-blue khadag scarf threaded around the sun visors. The rearview mirror twinkled with rhinestones; on the dashboard bobbled a plastic turtle. Steering through the snarl of Sukhbaatar Square, Bolor left the city center and came to an unpaved street, where she parked at Wagner Asia, a Denver-based Caterpillar equipment company that had been operating in Mongolia since the early days of capitalism. She walked past a security guard in combat fatigues and toward a service warehouse where workers in hard hats were driving forklifts and whacking at steel bars with large hammers. Nearby sat a city bus encased in a blue vinyl skin. Emblazoned on both sides were the image of a long-necked fat-tailed sauropod and the words DINOSAURS—ANCIENT FOSSILS, NEW DISCOVERIES, MOVABLE MUSEUM.

  In the late 1800s, American educators debated how best to teach the natural sciences in public schools, often cross-pollinating disciplines such as biology and geography with other topics. Massachusetts offered “Nature-Study and Literature.” California had “Nature-Study and Moral Culture.” New York City simply added “Nature Study,” allowing public school students to examine ten small cabinets of preserved birds on loan from the newly opened American Museum of Natural History. The program proved so popular that in 1904 it expanded, reaching well over a million students by 1916. The institution’s “movable museums,” which had “started with a suitcase,” progressed to delivery by motorcycle, and in the 1930s, operated out of converted ambulances. In the 1990s, AMNH switched to what were essentially city buses retrofitted with walk-in, interactive exhibits. Each bus featured a different subject, like anthropology and astronomy. The buses lumbered throughout the five boroughs, often drawing three hundred students a day while parked outside public libraries or churches.

  The museum eventually discontinued the program, and in 2013, announced plans to donate the buses. Bolor put her hand up for paleontology, with the idea that she’d drive it into the Gobi. The displays were interactive, a concept that did not yet exist in Mongolia’s museums, and conveniently, they already featured Gobi dinosaurs, one species of which was now well known because of USA v. Eric Prokopi. The museum approved her application, and before long Bolor’s NGO, the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs, was in possession of a modified Winnebago Adventurer still marked with AMNH branding and the name of the program’s early financial sponsor, Bloomberg.

  There arose a logistics problem: a bus measures 40 feet long, weighs over 10 tons, and is located in New York City. It must be moved to the other side of the world, yet it cannot be driven there. How many dollars are needed to relocate the bus the 10,783 nautical miles to the port of Tianjin, China, and then deliver it overland another thousand or so miles to Ulaanbaatar?

  After finishing her postdoc, Bolor had stayed close with Jack Horner and the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. Some scientists are good at science, some are better at explaining it to a lay audience, and a few are good at both. Horner had been called “the Tom Sawyer of paleontology” because he “gets people excited about dinosaurs, and then he recruits them to come and work (free!) at his digs.” That talent could also be parlayed into funding. The Museum of the Rockies’s board of directors included wealthy science lovers such as Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer. A polymath in his fifties with a Princeton PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics, Myhrvold was a trained chef and cookbook author who once teamed up with Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to donate over $12 million to the SETI Institute, which searches for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Through his investment firm, Intellectual Ventures, whose value has been estimated at $5 billion, Myhrvold irritated the technology world by controlling billions of dollars in patents as “one of Silicon Valley’s favorite villains.” Dinosaurs were among his many interests. Myhrvold published on dinosaur growth rates and collaborated wi
th Horner, and, teaming up with Philip Currie, he used computer simulations to theorize that a sauropod could flick the tip of its tail like a whip at supersonic speeds. (“To be blunt, the computer simulations are another case of garbage in, garbage out,” one paleontologist complained.) Along with Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio, the New York Times had named Myhrvold as an avid collector of fossils, which suggested that he engaged in the commercial practice that two of his beneficiaries, Horner and Bolor, publicly professed to despise.

  The board also included Gerry Ohrstrom, a New York investor with a Mexico-based asset management firm called Epicurus Fund. The Ohrstrom family annals involved references to Virginia horse breeding, the Olympics, Mel Gibson, Securities and Exchange fraud, Viscountess Rothermere, the CIA, the Paris Review, a New Jersey gangster named Longy, and a woman called Bubbles. The patriarch was George Ohrstrom Sr., who, in the 1920s, founded a private equity firm, G.L. Ohrstrom & Co., on Wall Street. Four of the companies that he bought in the 1930s and ’40s, which manufactured parts for oil rigs and pumps, were later conglomerated into Dover Corp., which made elevators. His son was George Ohrstrom Jr., a Greenwich Country Day School classmate of President George H. W. Bush and an early investor in President George W. Bush’s oil ventures. His son was Gerry, a science enthusiast. Gerry Ohrstrom once served on the board of the Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC, a think tank based in Bozeman, Montana. PERC encouraged “free market environmentalism,” which the group defined as “an approach to environmental problems that focuses on improving environmental quality using property rights and markets.” Ohrstrom served on the board in 2007 when PERC Reports published its fall issue. One article, headlined “Fossil Farming Blooms Where Barley Withers,” touched on the “huge disservice to science” posed by the fossil trade, but reported that “private landowners on barren stretches of the western plains are glad to have something to take to the bank.”

  Once upon a time, an original Picasso on the living room wall was more than adequate proof that the owner had successfully summited the economic peaks. Now, the work of famous artists is no longer proof of stratospheric wealth. Instead, high-end decorators hired by the wealthy are busily tracking down T. Rex teeth on eBay, bidding millions at Christie’s Auction House for mounted mammoth skeletons, or competing for foot-high dinosaur eggs. How else do you add interest to the den, drama to the entry hall, and curiosity to the coffee table? Fabergé eggs be gone!

  Ohrstrom helped finance Bolor’s outreach project, covering the cost of shipping the former AMNH bus from New York to Ulaanbaatar. Bolor rebranded the vehicle, replacing “Bloomberg” with “Ohrstrom/Epicurus,” and plastering over “American Museum of Natural History” with the logo for her NGO.

  Recently, she had hired a quiet, towering fellow with thick black hair and rosy cheeks named Ganbold to work as the driver/mechanic. He had spent years as a city bus driver in Ulaanbaatar, and Bolor liked his quiet, obedient temperament. As she crossed the parking lot at Wagner Asia, Ganbold stood waiting for her. She handed him a new windshield wiper (mostly for dust, not rain), and they spoke for a moment about a bad tire for which there was no spare. In the Gobi there would be no service stations, no tow trucks, so they needed to fix the tire before going to the desert on Monday. The exhibit’s touch screens also needed attention, as did the hydraulic system that lowered the steps so that people could board.

  Ganbold brought out his tools, which he kept in a Winnie the Pooh backpack. He opened the bus’s side panel, exposing the vehicle’s guts. Pulling out cables and hoses, he looked as baffled as a small-animal veterinarian tasked with saving the life of a water buffalo. Curious mechanics from the service warehouse gathered around, their denim coveralls inscribed “Safety First!” As they stared at an electrical diagram, trying to make sense of the engine, they uttered what occasionally sounded like English but wasn’t: Millicent did...a turkey and a ham...my daughter.

  After a while, Bolor walked next door to a company cafeteria, and stood in line with men in coveralls and hard hats, and women in high heels and short skirts. A cook handed her Styrofoam takeout containers of baked chicken in gravy, white rice, Russian potato salad, and shredded beets. Back at the bus, between consults with Ganbold, she ate her lunch in the cab with the windows open, a hot breeze blowing through.

  On the dashboard lay her pink leather notebook, which held her jotted schedule and ideas. While she still showed up at the American Museum of Natural History now and then, her official work for the institution had ended. Mark Norell and Mike Novacek and their team had already come and gone for the Gobi field season. Philip Currie was coming soon for a quick trip to the eastern Gobi with Tsogtbaatar and some students, but Bolor wasn’t involved in that, either.

  She had thought that Oyuna might name her the director of the new Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, but the job had gone to a woman with experience in museums but not science. Bolor had been hired as the museum’s chief paleontologist, but within six months she had quit. The disappointments had been depressing, and at times Bolor wanted to drop everything and focus on science or write children’s books about Mongolian paleontology. I’ve brought it this far: now somebody else can take over, she would think, and then something positive would happen and she would keep going. The dinosaur bus appeared to be a positive. She hoped that a smooth trip to the desert would allow her to raise money to continue, or even expand, her educational outreach. If she gave Mongolians information, they could speak for the Gobi bones, and she could stop shouting. The Mongolian Academy of Sciences still wouldn’t issue her a collection permit, but she needed no one’s permission to drive around in a big blue bus, teaching people about dinosaurs.

  On Monday, Ganbold drove the bus south, out of Ulaanbaatar, with Bolor riding shotgun in an “I Dig Dinosaurs” T-shirt. They were trailed by two rented Land Cruisers and a Russian UAZ Bukhanka—a khaki-colored van that resembles a tough cousin of the VW bus—altogether carrying a small scrum of media that had become interested in the project. The halfway point on the two-lane road from Ulaanbaatar to Dalanzadgad, the largest town in the desert, is Mandalgovi. On the way there, the bus stopped at a roadside café for ramen, dumplings, and the restroom, an outhouse that consisted of rickety planks spanning a deep pit in the earth.

  The sight of the bus drew a small crowd of children and their parents. The kids ventured toward the bus as if unsure whether it was safe to approach even the illustrations of the enormous creatures depicted on either side. Bolor opened the door and let down the stairs, and the first children of the Gobi Desert followed the memory of the children of New York City inside. There wasn’t enough time to hold an impromptu workshop, but for a few minutes the children got to walk in the “footsteps” of dinosaurs and see displays like “Mesozoic Mysteries” and “What’s for Dinner?” Those who read English learned that paleontologists “examine fossil jaws and teeth for clues to what dinosaurs ate;” after studying the “What caused the mass extinction” wall, they could watch a video of a re-creation of the asteroid impact that is thought to have killed all the non-avian dinosaurs.

  The bus closed up and moved on. Ganbold drove past cattle wading in a pond, a solitary ger, and two horses standing side by side at the edge of the pavement like a pair of wisecrackers in a cartoon. When the highway got rough, the caravan went off road, the passengers bouncing like popcorn. At the small city museum in Mandalgovi, Bolor was treated to airag and buuz, then she moved everyone along to Dalanzadgad, a city of about twenty thousand whose small airport had recently paved its dirt runway. They checked into the Dalanzadgad Hotel, which, depending on who you were and where you came from, was either spartan or the essence of luxury.

  The next day, Bolor met with government officials and the local tourism director, Tumendelger, who lived in DZ in a nice brick house with a fence around it. He had on a suit and a white shirt and a dinosaur-printed tie that he had bought at the American Museum of Natural History gift shop. The local media had been summoned. Bolor ex
plained her plans, in Mongolian, using the word tourism. Speeches followed, on the front steps of the government center.

  In a children’s workshop, Bolor and an assistant distributed sheets of paper and colored pencils, and the kids got busy working on an exercise involving a plastic toy mastodon and a dinosaur egg. Next, Bolor handed out flash cards as a sort of puzzle: the students studied laminated drawings of how an animal becomes a fossil and had to put them in the right order. Obviously Death came first and Erosion-and-Discovery came last, but did Transportation happen before or after Decomposition? And when was Weathering-and-Burial? After that, she passed out papers with images of animals on them and asked the children to think about which creatures were dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were built with their legs underneath them, not splayed out like a crocodile’s, Bolor explained. Dinosaurs were reptiles, which are different from mammals.

  The children worked in earnest silence, handling the small plastic toys that sat before them as reference. The plesiosaur had them stumped. Yes, it ends in “saur,” Bolor told them—but it’s not a dinosaur! Plesiosaurs were enormous marine reptiles that lived in the age of dinosaurs, but they were flippered and their skulls were built differently. She held up an image of a saber-tooth cat. Is it a dinosaur?

  No!

  What about this crocodile?

  No!

  This T. rex?

  Yes!

  Looking at the rex, the children were shocked that such an animal ever existed—tall and strong enough to trample a ger, with a mouthful of spiky teeth. But Bolor had more shocking news: right here in the Gobi, there once lived a remarkably similar animal called Tarbosaurus bataar.