The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  On January 13, 2015, a listing appeared for a big red tugboat “finished out for live aboard, huge interior, very nice and roomy.” The boat was a World War II net tender, commissioned into service by the U.S. Navy on February 18, 1941. Named the USS Noka, it had once belonged to the class of vessels that lay anti-torpedo and anti-submarine nets, a national defense system that had become necessary after Japan’s prewar aggressiveness in Manchuria, a heavily Mongolian and strategically coveted territory in northeastern China. Built in Texas, the Noka had motored from Port Arthur to New Orleans to Key West to Miami and had begun duty in Norfolk on the Fourth of July, five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The tug had served in and around Norfolk harbor throughout the war. Decommissioned on August 5, 1946, it was struck from the Naval Register and sold to successive owners, who renamed it the Doris Loveland, the Russell 16, the Lin Clay, and, finally, the Bay Queen.

  Websites that kept up with these kinds of things listed the vessel’s final disposition as “fate unknown.” But its fate was known: the Bay Queen was sitting red as an unpicked cherry right there in Norfolk, 45 miles south of where Eric stared at his computer. The boat, which measured 80 feet long and 20 feet wide, had been remodeled as a floating home roughly eighteen years earlier. The engine and steering system had been removed, but you could tow it and dock it and live in it. Belowdecks it had been turned into a master bedroom and full bath. The main deck had a den, another full bath, a dining area, and a galley with a full-size electric stove and fridge. “The tiled floor follows the shear of the hull so it goes uphill as you move forward,” read the ad. “After a while it seems pretty normal—you are on a boat, after all.” A spiral staircase led from the den to the upper deck, where there were two more bedroom areas, another full bath, and the old wheelhouse. The tug had central heating and air conditioning, hot-water heaters, and a washer/dryer hookup. Eric couldn’t imagine what more they would need.

  The seller wanted $29,000 and he wanted to show the boat only on weekends, but Eric couldn’t wait. The name of the marina wasn’t yet public, but he went on Google Earth and searched satellite images of the Norfolk shoreline until he found an unmistakable splash of red at Rebel Marina. Then he drove there and made the seller an offer. They settled on $22,000, Eric using money borrowed from his parents.

  Tyler moved into the Bay Queen, alongside docked trawlers and sailboats, including one named Never a Dull Moment. Eric’s probation officer inspected the tug and agreed to let Eric leave the garage apartment and move in early, partly because the boat had no motor. “Why can’t you just be normal?” he asked Eric.

  Eric and Tyler decorated the wood-paneled cabin with the vintage nautical pieces and magnifying glasses that Tyler liked to collect, and hung a framed Jacques Cousteau autograph over their desk. Nighttime on the water was so quiet they could hear the shrimp sizzle below them, like bacon frying.

  After house arrest came a year of probation, but Eric was freer that he had been in some time. He bought a black 2005 Ford Explorer off Craigslist; it had 160,000 miles on it, three hubcaps, and a busted AC, but it was a bargain at seven hundred bucks. For work, he started a commercial fossil forum on Facebook called Natural History and went back to where he started, selling shark teeth. The day before Thanksgiving 2015, he and Tyler got married at a rented cabin in the woods of North Carolina.

  The following spring, Amanda got engaged to George Bryan. They married in November—another Thanksgiving wedding. By then, the army had posted George to Savannah, and Amanda now lived at the beach, something she’d always wanted to do.

  Unable to be away from the children, Eric and Tyler had made plans to follow. They liked the thought of returning to the southeast and living three hours from Gainesville, five from Land O’ Lakes, where Eric’s parents still lived in the house where he grow up. For a minute, they thought about selling the Bay Queen, then decided to keep it. Towing it to Savannah would cost a fortune, so the Prokopis planned to retrofit it and pilot it down the coast themselves, all 600 nautical miles. They emptied the wheelhouse, which Rivers had been using as a bedroom, and restored the steering system. Eric welded a rig to the back of the boat to hold a pair of Mercury outboard motors and a lift for an old Boston Whaler he’d bought for quick runs to shore. Tyler enrolled in a boating safety course to learn the meanings of buoys, the perils of shipping lanes. The trip would take weeks. Nights, they would drop anchor. On the way, they would adopt a dog and repaint the tug and have it scrubbed of barnacles.

  Before leaving Virginia, they stowed most of their possessions in a storage unit and secured the onboard furniture with bungee cords. They raised an American flag on the stern. The mooring lines were released one morning in July. High in the pilothouse, Eric eased the old war boat out into the river and pointed it toward the waters of home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Fossils inspired the life’s work of some of the greatest influencers of how we think about the earth’s history and our place in it. As a child, Rachel Carson was said to have picked up a seashell while exploring the Allegheny River and begun wondering about the disappeared oceans and the life within them; I thought about her remarkable books often, especially The Sea Around Us, as I worked on this project. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction is another gorgeously alarming meditation on the planet’s past—and future. Books by the Stanford folklorist Adrienne Mayor helped me understand fossil finders’ role in early American and science history. The work of Columbia University historian Morris Rossabi was crucial to the contextualization of Mongolian history and culture; I also found the anthropologist Jack Weatherford’s work helpful, including his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. The writings of Hugh S. Torrens, emeritus professor of the history of science and technology at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, provided important details on the life of Mary Anning, as did biographies by Shelley Emling and Sir Crispin Tickell, an Anning family descendent. Mark Jaffe’s The Gilded Dinosaur is, to my mind, the definitive narrative text on the epic nineteenth century bone wars between Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. I am also indebted to books and other published work by Edwin H. Colbert, Stephen Jay Gould, Thomas Holtz, Kirk Johnson, Mark Norell, Michael Novacek, Martin J. S. Rudwick, and Neil Shubin. Details on some of these and other resources can be found in the selected bibliography.

  The AMNH archives hold a trove of stunning detail on the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s, and I’m grateful for the assistance of Gregory Raml, the museum’s special collections and research librarian. At the Baylor University library, Leanna Barcelona, Ellen Filgo, and Amie Oliver unearthed back issues of Libertas and other materials that without their conservatorship might have vanished. At the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia—another treasure house of historical and scientific information—Ria Capone tracked down a copy of All in the Bones, a wonderful biography of the original dinosaur artist, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins; the book’s author, Robert Peck, kindly solved a minor mystery related to Hawkins. Josh Grossberg, of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, made available an oral history of Holocaust survivors Roman and Cecilia Kriegstein, whose son asked that their name be preserved in the annals of science. Bruce Dinges of the Arizona Historical Society led me to vital information about the early days of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. Bob Jones, who published a history of the show, spoke with me at length about the show’s background.

  Eric Prokopi and his family quite simply opened their lives to me, having received no prior assurance of the result. Eric, Amanda, Tyler, and Eric’s parents, Doris and Bill, spoke with me time and again—usually in person in Florida, Virginia, or Georgia—about the civil asset forfeiture case, the federal criminal charges, and the life events and choices that bracketed those legal actions. These conversations began in 2012 as I reported “Bones of Contention,” the New Yorker story on which this book is based, and continued well into the spring of 2018. The Prokopi clan also shared scrapbooks, photos, correspondence, and other
materials that shed light on the life of a fossil dealer and details surrounding the T. bataar case. I’m also thankful to other commercial hunters, natural history brokers, collectors, and auction-industry executives who spoke with me on the record, including Coleman Burke, Frank Garcia, David Herskowitz, Andreas Kerner, Peter Larson, Thomas Lindgren, Tony Perez, Burkhard Pohl, Greg Rohan, Kirby Siber, Mike Triebold, Shirley Ulrich, Wally Ulrich, and George Winters.

  Throughout this project, I encountered scientists who were happy to share their expertise on paleontology, geology, taphonomy, stratigraphy, and a hundred other things. If I erred, it’s on me, not them. The Smithsonian’s Kirk Johnson, the University of Alberta’s Philip Currie, and the American Museum of Natural History’s Mark Norell were especially helpful, from the beginning. The vertebrate paleontologist Thomas Holtz provided timely help with the translated papers of the Russian scientist E. A. Maleev and connections to a vibrant listserv for vertebrate paleontologists. Other paleontologists, geologists, and fossil preparators who deserve thanks include Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar, Chultem Otgonjargal, Bruce Bailey, Barbara Beasley, Rachel Benton, J. P. Cavigelli, Clive Coy, Cari Johnson, Richard Hulbert, Eva Koppelhus, Vince Santucci, Jack Tseng, Justin Tully, and, of course, Bolortsetseg Minjin, who spoke with me time and again about her background, her role in the T. bataar case, and her ongoing efforts in science advocacy. Robert Painter fielded countless phone calls and questions, and I’m deeply grateful for his time. Heartfelt thanks also to Dave Rainey, Gereltuv Dashdoorov, Jeff Falt, Georges Lederman, Sharon Cohen Levin, Julie Makinen, Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, Yeweng Wong, Jeremy Xido and Amanda Burr, Selenge Yadmaa, Joe Sandler, and Betty Graham.

  Journalists think deeply about how to responsibly source their work. Anonymity is not granted lightly. The overwhelming majority of sources are named in the text or in Notes but for various reasons some are not. Their help is not forgotten. Mongolia especially is a deeply fascinating place to visit—and a challenging place to report. Many thanks to those who provided information or helped parse data that informed the work.

  This book exists because of my New Yorker editor, Daniel Zalewski, who gave the original T. bataar story life. DZ is that rare combination of big-picture thinker, detail hound, gorgeous writer, and bullshit detector; he’s simply the best editor I’ve ever known, and I feel extraordinarily fortunate to be a beneficiary of his formidable intellect and wit. I’m grateful beyond measure for David Remnick, who writes thank-you notes! and is never too busy to talk reporting/writing, or to provide counsel—he makes the New Yorker the finest home a journalist could want. My sincerest thanks also to Pam McCarthy, Bruce Diones, and fact checker extraordinaire Elisabeth Zerofsky.

  I cannot say enough about my exceptional agent, Joe Veltre, at The Gersh Agency, who is as decent a human being as he is world class at his work—I’m quite lucky to be represented by him and even luckier to know him and to call him a friend. My thanks also to his hardworking Gersh team, especially Alice Lawson, who was there at the start.

  At Hachette Books, profoundest possible thanks to Mauro DiPreta for his faith in this project and to Stacy Creamer for her early support. The wonderful Michelle Howry inherited the book as its editor, and as I continued reporting, and continued writing, and continued reporting some more, she tolerated delay after delay with much-appreciated humor and smarts—I loved working with her. The editor Paul Whitlatch in turn inherited the book as it entered the final production stages and expertly shepherded it home—I loved working with him, too. The rest of the extraordinary Hachette team included the marketing wizard Michael Barrs, the indefatigable copyeditor Ivy McFadden, and the publicity superstar Joanna Pinsker. Lauren Hummel allowed nothing to slip through the cracks and introduced me to my new favorite red pen. Alison Forner designed a stunning book jacket and Mandy Kain oversaw its creation. Michelle Aielli executed a brilliant maneuver—tote bags! VIP thanks to production editor Michael Olivo for heroically incorporating my never-ending changes into the final product. I’m so honored to have worked with all these pros.

  I could not have produced this book without the support of The MacDowell Colony, a magical sanctuary that I hope to always call home. The peace and comfort I found as a MacDowell fellow allowed me to work in a way that I never knew existed—with no-strings-attached support, and without distraction. What a gift. Thank you.

  My academic home, Columbia University, thrills me: I’m especially grateful to my colleagues Sheila Coronel, Laura Muha, and Steve Coll for bringing me in as the Laventhol/Newsday Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, where I’m honored to work with some of the best journalists in the business.

  I completed sections of this book while an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, where my excellent graduate assistants—successively Abby Johnston, Landon Woodroof, and Shawn Shinneman—were impressively helpful in organizing source materials and chasing down details and translations. I’ll always be grateful to the scheduling ninjas Kim Townlain and Jennifer Rowe for accommodating my complicated schedule as a journalist, teacher, and author, and to the powerhouse Amanda Hinnant for being such a fierce role model. I still marvel at the extraordinary librarian Dorothy Carner, who tracked down one scientific paper and obscurity after another, and I remain grateful for Dean Mills, the J-school dean emeritus, who initially brought me on board. I was lucky to have overlapped with a leader who knew, respected, and championed real journalism.

  My family cheerfully despised this project because it dominated my time and energies for so long. More than once, my mother, Joann, said, “Just put a period on it and say, ‘The End!’” My sister, Tracey, and her husband, Terry, and their children, Avery, Anna, and Tanner, kept the sweet tea ready in Tupelo. My brother, Mike, let me talk endlessly about rabbit-hole details—without interrupting—and made the project even more enjoyable by joining me on one of my reporting trips to Europe. My nieces, Avery and Anna, jumped in for a day of freelance research, which (for me) was fun. My cousin Jill has forever been and will always be a treasured, uplifting presence. I only wish my dad—Billy to his family, Bill to everyone else—were still with us.

  The great Bill Kovach, curator emeritus of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, provided pivotal faith and encouragement, even when he didn’t realize it. Likewise, I was lucky to have known for a time in my life the love and support of Dan Chapman and his parents, Bill and Christine Chapman.

  Old and dear friends, thank you. Claire Campbell, in North Carolina, and Pam Moore, in Massachusetts, took the time to read a draft and send smart, vital suggestions. Carol Leonnig was a lifeline, even while busy with her own book project and with the news she so brilliantly breaks. Pilita Clark and Peter Wilson, along with Michael Fry, drove me from London to Dorset and walked the rocky beaches with me in a spring drizzle, and made me laugh, so much. Terri Lichstein helped engineer my deadline-defying return to New York as only a treasured friend and 20/20 producer could do. Rebecca Skloot was the first person I told about this potential project, in 2009, as she was poised to release her world-changing book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; her irrepressible energy and devotion continue to inspire me. Audra Melton, brilliant photographer and life guru, never flagged while traipsing to Wyoming and South Dakota with me to shoot a museum crew’s T. rex excavation and a commercial crew’s search for a juvenile rex. Mark Jaffe fielded what were probably too many questions about Marsh and Cope, and I’m hoping he’ll take me to the ballet soon. With road trips, sushi, and music, Keri Thomas and Matt Ward helped clear the headspace for me to summon the energy to report and write a book at all. Florence Martin-Kessler and Mark Kessler, parents of the darling Kesslerettes, provided French translations and general esprit de corps. Elon Green pulled off coverage of a Manhattan repatriation ceremony when I couldn’t get quickly from Boston to New York. Miranda Metheny kindly and quickly translated the GEO article from German to English. Michael Caruso, editor of Smithsonian magazine, buoyed me with key assignm
ents and fun, supportive emails. Greg Brock did me a transcendent kindness during a particularly fraught deadline period: when I needed extreme solitude, he made available his beautiful cottage in the woods of Oxford, Mississippi, my soul’s home. Chin Wang, a dazzling designer and one of the best journalists I know, is, like others mentioned here, family. Sam Douglas: thank you, friend. Others who sheltered, fed, boosted, or advised me early on or along the way and who have my eternal thanks include Dannye and Lew Powell, Cindy Montgomery and Cliff Mehrtens, Melissa Hinton Benton, J. R. Moehringer, Bonnie Lafave, Jennifer McDonald, Mike Whitmer, Devin Friedman, Josh Dean, David Grann, Luke Dittrich, Ben Montgomery, Joseph Menn, Susan Orlean, and Rebecca Burns.

  To all these good people I owe a debt of gratitude that I won’t soon forget.

  QUICK REFERENCE TO DEEP TIME

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Addleton, Jonathan. Mongolia and the United States: A Diplomatic History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.

  Alvarez, Walter. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

  Andrews, Roy Chapman. Across Mongolian Plains: A Naturalist’s Account of China’s “Great Northwest.” New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1921.

  . All About Dinosaurs. New York: Random House, 1953.

  . An Explorer Comes Home. New York: Doubleday, 1947.

  . The New Conquest of Central Asia: A Narrative of the Explorations of the Central Asiatic Expeditions in Mongolia and China, 1921–1930. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1932.

  . On the Trail of Ancient Man: A Narrative of the Field Work of the Central Asiatic Expeditions. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926.