. This Business of Exploring. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.
. Under a Lucky Star: A Lifetime of Adventure. New York: The Viking Press, 1943.
Andrews, Roy Chapman, and William Diller Matthew. Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History, Under the Leadership of Roy Chapman Andrews. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1918–1925.
Anonymous. The Secret History of the Mongols. Mongolia: circa 1227.
Atwood, Christopher P. Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. New York: Facts on File, 2004.
Bakker, Robert. The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mysteries of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction. New York: William Morrow, 1986.
Barber, Lynn. The Heydey of Natural History 1820–1870. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980.
Blom, Philipp. To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting. New York: The Overlook Press, 2002.
Bramwell, Valerie, and Robert McCracken Peck. All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Special Publication No. 23. Philadelphia: The Academy of Natural Sciences, 2006.
Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.
. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962.
Cleaves, Francis Woodman. The Secret History of the Mongols for the First Time Done into English out of the Original Tongue and Provided with an Exegetical Commentary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Colbert, Edwin H. The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968.
Currie, Philip J., and Eva Koppelhus. Dinosaur Provincial Park: A Spectacular Ancient Ecosystem Revealed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Cutler, Alan. The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science Sainthood and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth. New York: Dutton, 2003.
Cuvier, Georges. Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and on the Changes Which They Have Produced in the Animal Kingdom. Paris, 1812, 1821, 1825.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859.
Dean, Dennis R. Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Dingus, Lowell, and Mark Norell. Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Dodson, Peter. The Horned Dinosaurs: A Natural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Dugatkin, Lee. Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Emling, Shelley. The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.
Fiffer, Steve. Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T-rex Ever Found. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2000.
Fowles, John. A Short History of Lyme Regis. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1983.
Gallenkamp, Charles. Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions. New York: Viking, 2001.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History. New York: Harmony Books, 1996.
Gould, Stephen Jay, and Rosamond Wolff Purcell. Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992.
Harris, Bev. Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. Seattle: Self-published online, 2004. blackboxvoting.org.
Hutton, James. Theory of the Earth. Edinburgh, UK: Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1796.
Jaffe, Mark. The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War between E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science. New York: Crown, 2000.
Johnson, Kirk, and Ray Troll. Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway: An Epoch Tale of a Scientist and an Artist on the Ultimate 5,000-Mile Paleo Road Trip. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2007.
Jones, Bob. A Fifty-Year History of the Tucson Show. Tucson, AZ: The Mineralogical Record Inc., 2004.
Katusa, Marin. The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped from America’s Grasp. New York: Wiley, 2014.
Kielan-Jaworowska, Zofia. Hunting for Dinosaurs. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1970.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014.
Kaplonski, Christopher. Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia: Memory of Heroes. London: Routledge, 2004.
Lawson, Russell M. Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
Long, John, and Peter Schouten. Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origins of Birds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Lyell, Charles. The Principles of Geology. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1857.
Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.
Mooallem, Jon. Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.
Morgan, David. The Mongols. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1986.
Murray, David. Museums: Their History and Use. Glasgow, UK: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904.
Norell, Mark. Unearthing the Dragon: The Great Feathered Dinosaur Discovery, with photographs and drawings by Mick Ellison. New York: Pi Press, 2005.
Novacek, Michael. Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.
Ostrom, John. Marsh’s Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
Paul, Gregory S. Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, latest edition 2010.
Pearce, Susan, Rosemary Flanders, and Fiona Morton. The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting. London: Routledge, 2016.
Pick, Nancy, and Frank Ward. Curious Footprints: Professor Hitchcock’s Dinosaur Tracks & Other Natural History Treasures of Amherst College. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2006.
Preston, Douglas. Dinosaurs in the Attic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Prothero, Donald R. The Story of Life in Twenty-Five Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Rainger, Ronald. An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn & Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991.
Randall, Lisa. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe. New York: Ecco, 2015.
Rossabi, Morris. The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
. The Mongols and Global History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Scott, Thomas M., et al. “Geologic Map of the State of Florida.” Tallahassee: Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Geological Survey, 2001.
Sellers, Charles Coleman. Mr. Peale’s Museum. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1980.
Semonin, Paul. American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Shubin, Neil. Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year-History of the Human Body. New York: Pantheon, 2008.
Simmons, John E. Museums: A History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Simpson, George Gaylord. Fossils and the History of Life. New York: Scientific American Books, 1983.
&n
bsp; Sonoda, Naoko. New Horizons for Asian Museums and Museology. Singapore: Springer, 2016.
Stegner, Wallace Earle. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
Sternberg, Charles Hazelius. The Life of a Fossil Hunter. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909.
Tickell, Crispin. Mary Anning of Lyme Regis. Lyme Regis, UK: Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, 1996.
Warren, Leonard. Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Weatherford, Jack. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2004.
Weishampel, David B., Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmólska. The Dinosauria. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Wilford, John Noble. The Riddle of the Dinosaur. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Winchester, Simon. The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
NOTES
EPIGRAPHS
1. Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us are classics on nature and environmentalism, was said to have been inspired by fossils as a child in Pennsylvania: “Springdale residents who remember Rachel as a young girl tell the story, perhaps true, perhaps apocryphal, that her romance with the ocean began one day when she found a large fossilized shell in the rocky outcroppings on the family’s hillside property. It provoked questions that Rachel wanted answers to. She wondered where it had come from, what animal had made it and lived within it, where it had gone, and what happened to the sea that had nurtured it so long ago.” See Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997).
INTRODUCTION: ORIGINS
1. Nate Murphy: For more about Murphy see the Billings Gazette series by Ed Kimmick, which starts with “Discovery & Deception: Spectacular Finds, Criminal Charges,” published May 3, 2009. For sentencing information in the Bureau of Land Management case see “U.S. Judge Gives Dino Collector Nate Murphy 120 Days in Pre-Release Center,” also by Kemmick, Billings Gazette; June 24, 2009. David Trexler, a paleontologist who had worked with Murphy, told the Gazette that when accusations against Murphy surfaced he ignored them, “figuring Murphy ‘was being persecuted because he didn’t have a degree, and it was a personality thing.’” After Murphy pleaded guilty, Sue Frary, director of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Murphy’s home town of Malta, told the newspaper that Murphy “did this to himself, and that is what is so tragic.”
2. Less than one percent: “Some fossils have been turned to stone, or petrified; many others are preserved, without any change other than the loss of soft tissues,” S. J. Olsen once wrote for the Florida Geological Survey. My brief account of fossilization is reductionism in the extreme. The process owes to complex factors, which you can read about in a variety of scientific texts, such as in chapter 7 of the paleontologist David D. Gillette’s book Seismosaurus: The Earth Shaker, published in 1994 by Columbia University Press, New York. (For an interesting update on that dinosaur see “Whatever Happened to Seismosaurus?” by Brian Switek, smithsonian.com; August 17, 2010, in which Switek overviews the subsequent conclusion that Seismosaurus was “really an especially large Diplodocus.” He writes, “Misidentifications are sometimes made—‘pygmy’ species have turned out to be juveniles of known species and partial skeletons of giants have been discovered to be difficult-to-interpret parts of more modestly sized animals—but science self-corrects as it goes along.”) See also “Most Species That Disappear Today Will Leave No Trace in the Fossil Record,” by Patrick Monahan, Science; March 15, 2016.
3. Leonardo: The dinosaur skeleton was discovered on July 27, 2000, and was so named because graffiti on a nearby rock read “Leonard Webb and Geneva Jordan, 1917.” The discovery was later presented at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, showing that at the time of his premature death Leonardo stood twenty-two feet long, weighed up to two tons, and was covered in small polygonal scales. For a brief overview, see “‘Mummified’ Dinosaur Discovered in Montana,” by Hillary Mayell, National Geographic News; October 11, 2002. See also “Dinosaur Spills His Guts,” by Robin Lloyd, Live Science; September 25, 2008.
4. “skin, scales”: “‘Mummified’ Dinosaur Discovered in Montana,” by Hillary Mayell, National Geographic News; October 11, 2002.
5. One percent, continued: Yet while fossils are a nonrenewable resource, there are untold millions of fossils out there. We’ve documented more than 1.2 million species in the 250 years that we’ve been assigning taxonomic classifications. An estimated 86 percent of the planet’s existing species and 91 percent of ocean life “still await description.” See “How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?” by Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, and Boris Worm, PLOS; August 23, 2011; journals.plos.org.
6. For an overview of Glossopteris and continental drift, see “Alfred Wegener: Building a Case for Continental Drift,” published online in December 2014 by the University of Illinois, http://publish.illinois.edu/alfredwegener/.
7. Western Interior Seaway: A hundred million years ago, during the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era—the time of the terrestrial dinosaurs—the Farallon Plate of the Pacific Ocean pushed beneath the North American continent, raising mountains and volcanoes. As the middle of the continent sank, water from the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean flowed into the depression, creating a vast, shallow sea. The sea covered Florida, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, Mississippi, Louisiana, and parts of Montana, Utah, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, and most of South Dakota. (Picture boating from Idaho to Iowa.) Extraordinary creatures lived in and around this sea for tens of millions of years. The land animals included dinosaurs. The marine animals included enormous plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. The flying reptiles included pterosaurs. “...You had mountains popping up, and as they popped up they got eroded on top, and the sediments came down onto a flat plain,” I once watched P. J. Cavigelli, collections manager of the Tate Geological Museum, in Casper, Wyoming, tell a small group of tourists visiting the Lance Formation, near Lusk, where he and his team were digging out an adult T. rex. “These rushing rivers came down and lost their velocity and started dropping sediment, and deposited fossils—I compare this to what’s going on in Bangladesh right now, in the Himalayas. The ocean was just a hundred miles thataway.” He pointed, talking about the Western Interior Seaway. “Every now and then you’d get catastrophic floods that buried things. That’s where we get our good skeletons.”
8. “I’ve been in people’s houses”: “A Tyrannosaur of One’s Own,” by Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Aeon; January 28, 2016.
9. Microscopic fossils: The oldest known fossils are cyanobacteria and date to 3.5 billion years ago. For an overview, see “Introduction to the Cyanobacteria: Architects of earth’s atmosphere,” by the University of California Museum of Paleontology, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/cyanointro.html.
10. Fossil vertebrates and invertebrates: See “What You Should Know about Vertebrate Fossils,” Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, vertpaleo.org.
11. Overseas museums...have no problem buying commercially: In June 1984, the Academy created the Committee on Guidelines for Paleontological Collecting, under the auspices of the Board on Earth Sciences of the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Resources. The committee, whose thirteen members included paleontologists, the commercial fossil hunter Peter Larson, and representatives from the surface mining industry, state/federal government, and natural history museums, was appointed to serve through June 30, 1987. The committee was created “because of increasing concern by scientists over conflicts between collectors of fossils and land managers, developers, and other constituencies. For many years, the major area of conflict involved vertebrate fossils and various, mostly federal, land-managing agencies. However, the conflict h
as now expanded to include all of paleontology, and it is having an impact on all sciences that use fossils. Even hobby collectors have been involved in the conflict.” See “Paleontological Collecting,” by the Committee on Guidelines for Paleontological Collecting, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1987.
12. Shell casings: Not to get too far afield here, but for information on forensic evidence see “Types of Forensic Evidence,” by the National Institute of Justice, nij.gov.
13. Big Bone Lick: In July 1739, thirty-seven years before the birth of the United States, an expedition left Montreal for New Orleans in a fleet of war canoes. The party consisted of more than a hundred French soldiers and more than three hundred natives, commanded by a Canadian military officer, full name Charles Le Moyne, Baron de Longueuil. The group intended to defeat the Chickasaw Indians, allies of the English, and control the Mississippi River. The expedition paddled south to the Allegheny River. If the Indians were Algonquin Abenaki, as it’s believed that they were, the party would have traveled in large birch-bark canoes and kept completely silent while in transit, the better to slip up on game and avoid detection by enemies or “water monsters.” (See Fossil Legends of the First Americans, by Adrienne Mayor, published in 2005 by Princeton University Press.) Upon reaching the lower Ohio River, the party made camp east of what is now Louisville, Kentucky. An Indian hunting party went out to find game. Following buffalo tracks to a swamp that reeked of sulfur, they came upon massive bones, some as tall as a man, protruding from the earth like an untended graveyard. Native Americans already had legends about big bones often found in the earth. The legends referenced giant animals that resembled a magnified version of bison. The French often get credit for discovering America’s first significant fossils but the Iroquois alone had been talking about fossils for at least two hundred years. As their oral histories showed, Native Americans were not dumbfounded by very old bones, as white people later claimed, but rather intuited their connection to prehistoric life. American Indian explanations for fossils varied according to where they lived and what they saw, and to the stories their ancestors had told. The significance of “magic horn,” on the other hand, was universal. Magic horn meant ivory, which was useful in the making of amulets and tools. Ivory meant money. Standing at the edge of that reeking swamp, Algonquians would have recognized tusks as a commodity treasured by European traders, who were eager to compete against Siberian ivory. At the bog that day, the hunters recovered as much as they could manage: three massive teeth, along with a tusk and femur. They hauled the fossils back to camp, where the French found them so curious they packed the materials up and shipped them to Paris. In 1740, the fossils were delivered to the Jardin des Plantes, the royal botanical gardens, and stored in Louis XV’s royal Cabinet du Roi, his cabinet of curiosities. In his report, Longueuil acknowledged “les Sauvages” for finding the bones, yet never mentioned the name of the tribe or credited the discoverers by name. Eventually, the discovery site was mined for salt, and became known as Big Bone Lick. Today it’s a state park in the town of Union, Kentucky, about twenty-five miles southwest of Cincinnati. (See The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, published in 2014 by Henry Holt and Company.) The welcome sign reads “Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology,” though that is a tricky claim to make. The Big Bone Lick fossils weren’t the first discovered on the continent, but it was true that they were the ones that had made the biggest international impression. Nearly a hundred years after the hunting party entered the bog, the Canadian paleontologist Edward M. Kindle suggested that Native Americans be credited with the first significant fossil discoveries in America. Scientists weren’t so well inclined. Among them was George Gaylord Simpson, an American Museum of Natural History curator and celebrated paleontologist who taught zoology at Columbia, then at Harvard. Simpson considered all Indian fossil discoveries as “casual finds without scientific equal.” He wrote, “Indians certainly found and occasionally collected bones...but these discoveries are no real part of paleontological history.” His point: Just as “Columbus discovered America,” Longueuil discovered America’s first fossils. The favored narrative held. The park signs and literature, and most historical accounts, still credit Longueuil, underscoring Simpson’s idea that scientific discovery is more about results than about getting there first.
The Dinosaur Artist Page 35