The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  14. Large three-toed footprints: The longest river in New England, the Connecticut, runs through the wild green western wing of Massachusetts. In 1800, a nine-year-old boy named Pliny Moody was plowing his father’s land there, in the town of South Hadley, when his blade struck stone. Unearthing the object, he found a set of strange impressions in rock. Three-toed, like a turkey, the prints measured a foot long, as if a large bird had walked across wet cement. Pliny hauled the slab home to his parents, Ebenezer and Lois, and the Moody family installed it as a decorative doorstep. Townspeople debated what creature had made the tracks, most attributing them to “Noah’s raven,” the Biblical bird sent forth from the ark during the Flood to find land. Eventually the tracks became known to Edward Hitchcock, the son of a poor local hatter who turned to the ministry, “having been led by my trials to feel the infinite importance of eternal things...” (Edward Hitchcock’s papers are archived at Amherst College. An excellent resource is Curious Footprints: Professor Hitchcock’s Dinosaur Tracks & Other Natural History Treasures at Amherst College, by Nancy Pick and Frank Ward, published by Amherst College, 2006.) Hitchcock became Amherst College’s professor of chemistry and natural history in 1825, hoping to impart to his students the principles of “natural theology,” or how geology intersected with religion, though at the time the school owned “not even a skeleton” through which students could learn human anatomy. Hitchcock’s wife, Orra, an artist, illustrated his lectures. In 1830, when the state appointed him to make a geological survey of Massachusetts, something that only one other state, North Carolina, had done, Hitchcock relished the opportunity to walk and improve his fragile health. Traveling around Massachusetts, he documented the landscape and stones, using Charles Lyell’s recently published Principles of Geology as a reference.

  The State of Massachusetts printed twelve hundred copies of Hitchcock’s survey, one for every town, plus two for Amherst and two each for the state’s colleges, Williams and Harvard. Within the next few years, twenty states would make geological maps of their own, producing a tool crucial to locating and interpreting rock formations, sediments, and soils. Geological maps allowed for the planning of communities and roads, the identification of mineral and ore deposits, and the finding of water, and helped civic leaders understand how to prepare for natural disasters such as landslides and earthquakes. Along the way, Hitchcock didn’t just come to depend on fossils; he became transfixed by them.

  In the nearby town of Greenfield a quarrier in his late twenties was busy working odd jobs. Dexter Marsh had dark, curly hair and a long nose and a beard that cupped his chin without covering it. He came up rough and had not even an elementary school education, but he could read and write and townspeople knew him as “a man of great force and originality, one of the strongest thinkers and closest reasoners with whom I ever became conversant,” wrote Lorenzo Langstroth, a teacher and pastor. Marsh’s daybooks, though marked by “Spartan brevity,” were filled with fragmented descriptions of his activities and expenses. May 24: “boards for fence .46.” August 11: “tickets to see the model of ancient Jerusalem .40.” Marsh didn’t mention his first wife’s death in his daybooks, or his second marriage, or the birth of any of his five children, but he noted the “first plum tree blown” and a “bonnet for Arabella,” along with the letters he sent, the snuff boxes he purchased, and the antislavery efforts he supported in Greenfield, a stop on the Underground Railroad. All his life, Marsh had been a hard and clever worker. When he yoked his first oxen he was so small “he had to stand upon a block to do it.” He saved money on hand-made rabbit traps by building them with wooden pegs instead of nails. He was considered a “mechanic”—a handyman. In his daybooks he often labeled the wood-chopping or the ditch-digging or the stone-laying or the apple-picking or the snow-shoveling simply “work.” At Town Hall, he was the janitor. At the Second Congregational Church, he rang the bells for weddings and funerals. He also quarried sandstone. In 1835, he was installing a sidewalk on a hill near the courthouse when he noticed birdlike tracks in one of the slabs. “This was an hour of perplexity,” wrote Oliver Marcy, a natural sciences professor who went on to found Northwestern University’s Museum of Natural History. “To that time he was wholly ignorant of geology, and possessed only the common notion of the formation of the earth; but being a man of accurate observation and logical order of thought, he was convinced that the print before him was the print of a bird’s foot. But the print was in solid rock, quarried from several feet beneath the surface. How it came there he could not decide.” Marsh began collecting the trackways, including those that had lain in plain sight for years. The stones that everyone assumed were “imperfect flags”—irregulars—now “were taken up as valuable.” The slabs were the color of rust; they were rough, with jagged borders. Some were small enough to hold, and others were as heavy and broad as a tabletop.

  As Marsh quarried the trackways he’d prop the slabs against his fence and ask people what animal they thought had made them. Some of the prints lay in the flagstone walkway of a man named William Wilson, who showed them to a local doctor, James Deane, who became fascinated with them and described them to Edward Hitchcock in a letter. Hitchcock traveled the twenty miles north, from Amherst, to see the “footmarks” for himself, finding what would become his life’s work. “In the six following years I brought out five papers in the journals, containing over a hundred pages and 26 plates, describing 32 species, including my first paper, before any one else had described one species, and before they had scarcely been noticed by any other writer,” he wrote. At first, Hitchcock doubted the tracks were footprints—the world’s only confirmed fossil tracks were in Scotland, possibly left by an ancient tortoise. But the more slabs he saw the more he decided that Marsh might be right: the tracks belonged to birds, some of them small and others “almost incredibly large.”

  But why were no bones ever found along with the tracks? These creatures seemed to have strolled through muck and then vanished, their path frozen for all time. At first, no one agreed with Hitchcock. What bird on earth grew to such sizes? “The whole length of the foot...is sixteen or seventeen inches!” Hitchcock wrote at one point, saying the bird’s stride measured “between four and six feet!” Yet as Hitchcock went on amassing a collection and publishing what he found, geologists found the evidence to be in his favor, and other scientists began to come around, at a price. “...The disclosures made by my writings attracted others into the field who became uncompromising competitors in the way of collecting, and with some it became a matter of trade,” he wrote. “The consequence was that the value of specimens rose to almost fabulous prices.”

  The quarryman Dexter Marsh was the largest supplier. He told Hitchcock it was his ambition to assemble the largest collection of fossil footprints in the world. Marsh could look at a trackway and “not only tell the direction of a bird, but its comparative speed, the condition of the mud, whether the weather was rainy or not, whether the bird making the track was walking on shore or in the water, and when the bird passed from shore into the water,” Marcy wrote. “He came at very definite conclusions concerning the weight and height of the birds.”

  When Hitchcock heard about the Pliny Moody tracks, in South Hadley, he went to see those, too. By now Elihu Dwight, a Dartmouth graduate and one of the first doctors in town, had acquired the slab from the Moodys; now Hitchcock acquired it from Dwight for the Amherst collection, where it remains on display today. Hitchcock’s analysis of the trackways was published in the July 1836 issue of the American Journal of Science, establishing the scientific disciplines of ichnology (the study of trace fossils and imprints) and ornithichnology (the study of stony bird tracks). Dexter Marsh wasn’t mentioned in the paper, and neither was Pliny Moody.

  Word spread quickly from America to Europe that giant fossil bird prints had been found in New England. “This animal turns out to have been one of the most common of all that trod upon the muddy shores...,” Hitchcock wrote. “I regarded it as the giant rule
r of the valley.” Eventually becoming president of Amherst College, he received a visit from Charles Lyell and at least one letter from Charles Darwin. Dexter Marsh, meanwhile, built a “cabinet” at his home and, starting in January 1846, opened it to the public as a free museum. People came from Germany, Turkey, Baltimore, Natchez, and New Orleans to see the world’s finest collection of fossil trackways. The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes visited, as did the Scottish chemist James F. W. Johnston, a cofounder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. After viewing the collection Johnston wrote that Marsh was “only a common mason and gardener, but he has, nonetheless, spent more time and money in searching for and digging up the bird-tracks of this region, and possesses a larger and finer collection of them, than any other person or institution in the United States.” He added, “In looking at this collection made by a working man, dug up either with his own hands, or by men working along with him—at his expense, under his direction, and in spots which his own sagacity indicated as likely to reward research—I could not refrain from admiring the enthusiasm and perseverance of their owner, and regretting that, even in this intellectual State, science was too poor, not only to engage such a man wholly in its service, and to add to its treasures by employing him unremittingly in his favorite pursuit, but that it was unable even to purchase the fruits of his past labours, and add them to the public collections...” Johnson wrote, “I must add...what all collectors will well understand, that Mr. Marsh looks upon these slabs of stone as so many children...Mr. Marsh has living feet gathering now in plenty around his daily table...for their sake, these great stones should be converted into bread.” Marsh is buried beneath a simple stone at the Federal Street Cemetery in Greenfield. His collection was auctioned, some to Harvard, some to Yale, some to the Boston Society of Natural History, and some to Hitchcock, for Amherst, with funds contributed by John Tappan, an early settler of Brookline; the philanthropist and developer David Sears; and Gerard Hallock, an owner of the New York Observer. The Marsh fossils, along with Hitchcock’s trackways, are now beautifully displayed at the Beneski Museum at Amherst, along with the Pliny Moody slab.

  A quarrier named Roswell Field, who lived in Gill, picked up where Dexter Marsh left off, extracting the most trackways on record. “His prices have indeed been generally high, but when the specimen was unique, I must give him what he asked, or leave it for some one else,” Hitchcock wrote, adding, “To persons not familiar with the value of natural history specimens, the idea of giving $150 for a broken slab of stone a few feet square...seems extravagance and folly.” The Marsh auction had had an unintended side effect, producing “an impression of the great value of these relics throughout the Valley.” Now, “exorbitant prices were attached to them wherever found.” To save money, Hitchcock sometimes dug fossils himself and transported them on his personal wagon, arriving in Amherst in “evening, because, especially of late, such manual labor is regarded by many as not comporting with the dignity of a professor.” But it was Roswell Field who called the trackways what they were. In 1859 he traveled to Springfield, to present a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, saying, “If I can rightly decipher these fossil inscriptions, impressed on the tombstones of a race of animals that have long since ceased to exist, they should all of them be classed as Reptilia.” He was correct. They were dinosaur. Hitchcock bought Field’s collection, too. The person who finally confirmed that that dinosaurs made the “curious footprints” of the Connecticut Valley was a Philadelphia Quaker named Edward Drinker Cope, whose thirst for fossils contributed to the “bone wars” of the late 1800s, the greatest dinosaur-hunting showdown in history.

  15. “among the greatest fossil collectors”: “Harley Garbani dies at 88,” by Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times; April 24, 2011.

  16. Stan Sacrison: Buffalo, the county seat, is a blip on the two-lane highway, with a great bar, Saloon 3. The skull of one of Stan’s finds, Tyrannosaurus Stan, has been called the finest rex head on record. It’s on display at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a commercial hunting, prepping, and casting company in Black Hills, South Dakota. BHI excavated and prepped the skeleton and now sells casts of it for a hundred thousand dollars apiece. See “Boneheads: A Tale of Big Money, Prison, Disney World, and the World’s Foremost Dinosaur-Hunting Twins,” by John Tayman, Outside; May 2001.

  17. Contributions of commercial fossil hunters: For one perspective, see Neal L. Larson, Walter Stein, Michael Triebold, and George Winters, “What Commercial Fossil Hunters Contribute to Paleontology,” published in the Journal of Paleontological Sciences, a publication of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, the trade group for commercial fossil dealers. AAPS is the commercial counterpoint to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. The international organization, whose membership consists primarily of scientists, publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Larson et al. wrote, “Like our academic colleagues, we love the field of paleontology and the pursuit of the unknown. Most of us are driven by our passion and not by profits.” And most, they added, “would be pleased to have closer relationships with academic paleontologists.”

  18. Vulcanodon: The early Jurassic sauropod, one of the long-necked plant eaters, lived in what is now Zimbabwe. The Natural History Museum, in London, has a great interactive dinosaur timeline at http://www.nhm.ac.uk.

  19. “The Nation’s T. rex”: The skeleton will be on loan to the Smithsonian for fifty years. See “‘Nation’s T. rex’ Stands Upright for the First Time in 65 Million Year—and He’s Scary,” by John Woodrow Cox, Washington Post; October 1, 2015. There’s great video with that one. See also “Track the Nation’s T-Rex as It Arrives at the Smithsonian,” by Kirstin Fawcett, smithsonianmag.com; April 14, 2014.

  20. “Whether or not it’s okay to sell”: “The Greatest Challenge to 21st Century Paleontology: When Commercialization of Fossils Threatens the Science,” by Kenshu Shimada, Philip J. Currie, Eric Scott, and Stuart S. Sumida, Palaeontologia Electronica, March 2014.

  21. “rocks that can talk to you”: Interviews with Kirk Johnson, Sant Director, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

  CHAPTER 1: “SUPERB TYRANNOSAURUS SKELETON”

  1. “Foul was the evil...”: Saint Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Image Classics, 1960).

  2. His right eye: Eric Prokopi’s eye problem was later diagnosed as herpetic keratitis, a painful condition that, if left untreated, can lead to blindness. Amanda blamed “dinosaur dust” from the many hours of prep work Eric did, but the condition is more like a cold sore of the eye.

  3. Giant ground sloth: The animal evolved around 35 million years ago in South America and went extinct during the last ice age. (The six current species are tree sloths.) Megatherium was the largest of its kind—over twelve feet tall when standing on its hind legs. Megalonyx jeffersonii, one species of extinct sloth, was named for President Thomas Jefferson, an avid fossil collector who displayed his collection at the White House, after someone sent him a set of bones found in a West Virginia cave. Based upon the cave bones, Jefferson prepared what’s been called America’s first scientific paper and delivered it in 1797 at the American Philosophical Society.

  4. World’s largest natural history shows: The Tucson show takes place in late January and early February. Denver is in September. Munich is in October. Tokyo, December. These shows attract many thousands of natural history vendors and buyers; many of the buyers are private or overseas museums, scientists, teachers, and private collectors. Public museums in the United States generally don’t buy commercial anymore.