7. “man’s slash and burn tactics”: Capuzzo, “He Feels the Future in His Bones.”
8. “You realize you’re the first human being to ever see that”: Sabrina Porter, “The Fossil Hunt Is On and the Larneds Lead the Posse,” Lakeland Ledger, December 7, 1980. For more information on Bone Valley, check out the Mulberry Phosphate Museum, in Mulberry, Florida, “the phosphate capital of the world,” www.mulber ryphosphatemuseum.org. The museum bought Joe Larned’s collection.
9. “I think what impressed me most”: Sunrise at Bone Valley, Florida West Coast Public Broadcasting Inc., 1990.
10. “the world’s largest dolphin skull”: Frank Garcia’s Facebook page.
11. Lifted as a whole: For more on jacketing fossils, see “Techniques in the Field,” AMNH, http://preparation.paleo.amnh.org.
12. “Did you learn”: Interviews with Garcia, and Garcia’s memoirs.
13. “field associate”: This is per Daryl Domning, a longtime Howard University professor and Smithsonian affiliate. Domning said Garcia worked with him “extensively” in the 1980s, “collecting in Bone Valley and nearby areas of Florida, with his field expenses funded by my NSF grants.” Garcia also had a relationship with Clayton Ray, the longtime curator of late Cenozoic mammals and fossil marine mammals in the NMNH’s paleobiology department.
14. “heroic”: Domning said Garcia “provided the overwhelming bulk of NMNH’s collection of Bone Valley sirenian fossils. These included the first in-situ specimens of a new species that I named after him in 2008 (Nanosiren garciae).”
15. Illustrated Guide to Fossil Vertebrates: Garcia published the book in 1974 and at last check it was available through Amazon for $9.99.
16. Leisey shell pit: Florida West Coast Public Broadcasting Inc. made a one-hour documentary about Garcia’s Leisey discovery in 1990, called Sunrise at Bone Valley, which is also the title of one of Garcia’s memoirs. Garcia posted the documentary to YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWJyE2Wq96Q. You can see the vastness of the Bone Valley terrain and the drag lines at work, along with Garcia teaching and talking about fossil hunting.
17. “extremely significant”: Gil Klein, “Amateur Digger May Have Made the Biggest US Fossil Find Ever,” Christian Science Monitor, January 16, 1984.
18. “new chapter”: Ibid.
19. “You’ve been offered a great deal of money”: “Amateur Fossil Hunter Frank Garcia Interviewed,” Today, NBC, April 17, 1985. NBCUniversal Media LLC. Provided by NBCUniversal Archive.
20. “an amateur in the best sense of the word”: Klein, “Amateur Digger.”
21. “In twenty years”: Sunrise at Bone Valley documentary, Florida West Coast Public Broadcasting Inc., via YouTube.
22. For more information on Florida’s fossil-collecting law, see floridamuseum.ufl.edu.
23. Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences: AAPS was first created in 1977–78 as the American Association of Paleontological Suppliers, to serve as a “united voice” for the fossil trade and to promote “ethical collecting practices and cooperative liaisons with researchers, instructors, curators, and exhibit managers in the academic and museum paleontological community.” In the early 1990s, a group called the International Association of Paleontological Suppliers was created “to help foreign businesses organize and become aware of legislation in various countries regarding the import and export of fossils.” The IAPS joined the AAPS in 2002. See aaps.net.
24. “unaware that the commercialization”: Shimada, Currie, et al.
25. “misguided perceptions”: Ibid.
26. “Mystical, magical”: Frank Garcia, Sunrise at Bone Valley (self-pub., 1988). As he wrote the book, Frank was excavating “the world’s largest llama site” at the Leisey pit, a find that had been indirectly prognosticated by a seer he met via an acquaintance called “Mama Fish.”
27. “Imagine a character”: Frank Garcia, I Don’t Have Time to Be Sane: The Life Story of One of the Most Notorious Fossil Hunters in America (self-pub, Fossil Finder Books, 2007). This line was written by Don Miller, president of the Delaware Paleontological Society, who authored the preface.
28. “His lectures are always educational”: Garcia, Sunrise at Bone Valley.
29. “You are never too old”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 4: DIVE
1. Leisey shell pit descriptions: interviews with Frank Garcia, Doris Prokopi, and Eric Prokopi; Garcia memoirs; photos, videos, and news archives. The story was widely covered in the 1980s by Florida newspapers and magazines including Time and Newsweek. A good overall source of Leisey information is the Florida Museum of Natural History, whose website, floridamuseum.ufl.edu, notes: “Prior to the discovery of the Leisey Shell Pit 1A locality, the commercial shell pits of South Florida had not been considered a significant source for sizable concentrations of vertebrate fossils. Leisey changed that view...”
2. Technological advances: For information on tech in paleontology, see John A. Cunningham, Imran A. Rahman, Stephan Lautenschlager, et al. “A Virtual World of Paleontology,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 29, 6 (June 2014).
3. “He smells them”: Interviews with Doris Prokopi.
4. “just pick out whatever we wanted”: Porter, “The Fossil Hunt Is On.”
5. “We wouldn’t even stop”: Ibid. One of the books in Eric Prokopi’s eventual personal library was Ocean Realm Diving Guide to Underwater Florida, by Ned DeLoach, (Miami: Ocean Realm Publishing Corp., 1983). His copy was so worn it was held together with Scotch tape.
6. Diving: I must have read five hundred newsletter articles and book excerpts on the experience of river diving. I liked one Tampa Bay Fossil Chronicles piece from September 1992, by Leslie Newberry, a certified divemaster, describing the Withlacoochee River, which is considered dark water because of all the tannic acid: it leaches from cypress roots, “turning the water the color of tea or coffee.” Newberry wrote about the morning mist curling off the water, the sputtering boat motor, the pungent damp-wood smell, and the overall feeling of “entering a primitive place during an era long past. Out in the distance, you almost expect to see a mammoth or mastodon elephant on the banks of the river, taking an early morning drink.”
7. “sinker wood”: One source is “1800s-Era Sunken Logs Are Now Treasure; Here Are the Men Who Find Them,” by David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2014.
8. “priests, government officials, kings, emperors, slaves”: Russell M. Lawson, Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia. An excellent source of information is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. Mayor, a Stanford folklorist who has called herself a “historian of ‘science before Science,’” spent two decades on the work, which blends classical studies and paleontological science, connecting Greek myths and monsters like griffins to, for example, illiterate nomads’ ancient interpretations of the dinosaur bones they found in the Gobi Desert. “The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar—to excavate, decipher, and bring to life the tantalizing remains of a time we will never see,” Mayor wrote. In a new introduction for the book, which has become an interdisciplinary staple in university curricula, she wrote, “The sensation of losing track of time and place while submerged in libraries and museums often put me in mind of Jacques Cousteau’s phrase l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs, ‘rapture of the deep,’ to describe the giddy intoxication experienced by divers exploring hitherto inaccessible undersea realms.”
9. Anaximander lived from 611 to 546 BCE.
10. Xenophanes may have been the first: G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
11. Aristotle: Ibid. Mayor wrote, “It is often suggested that Aristotle’s ‘fixity of species’ idea was a deathblow to rational speculation about evolution and extinction in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. This misleading view unfairly conflates two very different cultures and eras. The n
otion of immutable species created in one fell swoop was not a monolithic principle in classic antiquity—it only became so in the Middle Ages when Aristotelian thought was merged with biblical dogma in Europe.”
12. Pliny the Elder: This guy was a “night-worker,” an instant napper, a rabid bather, and a vital link in the history of science. The ten volumes of Natural History covered astronomy, meteorology, geography, ethnography, anthropology, human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, horticulture, pharmacology, magic, water, mining, and mineralogy. Pliny understood the scope and potential legacy of his attempt, writing, “There is not one of us who has made the same venture, nor yet one Roman who has tackled single-handed all departments of the subject.” No one, it was true, had written a book with a chapter on strange rain and on “Milk, Blood, Flesh, Iron, Wool, Tiles, and Bricks.” No one, at least not quite in Pliny’s way, had dismissed rainbows, which “fortel not so much.” Natural History influenced scientists for centuries to come, and two thousand years later is still engaging reading, especially the bits infused with superstitious customs “established by those of old, who believed that gods are present on all occasions and at all times.” To wit: before eating at table, it is customary to remove one’s ring. To calm anxiety, dab a bit of saliva behind the ear. To signal approval, give a thumbs-down. To worship lightning, cluck the tongue. If, during a banquet, you happen to stupidly mention fire, reverse the omen by pouring water beneath the table. Women, never twirl your spindles while walking down a road or else you’ll invite a blighted harvest. Never sit with your fingers interlaced while visiting a pregnant woman, lest you be accused of sorcery. To cure epilepsy, feed the patient the flesh of a wild animal slain with the same iron weapon that killed a human being. Also good for epilepsy: sex. Should you happen to swallow some quicksilver (and who doesn’t, from time to time?) chase it with lard. And etc., involving goat dung, ivory shavings, ant eggs, sea frogs boiled in vinegar, “complaints of the anus,” and knots tied while saying the name of a widow. Love, by the way, “is killed by a bramble toad worn as an amulet in a fresh piece of sheep’s skin.” In case you wanted to know.
Two years after finishing Natural History, Pliny was fifty-six, overweight, and suffering from asthma. It was the year 79. Now the commander of a Roman fleet, he lived in Misenum, on the western side of the Bay of Naples. Like a lot of Romans, he enjoyed coating his skin in oil and bathing in the sun. This is what he did on the 24th of August, after which he fixed himself a “light luncheon” and went “back to his books,” his nephew, Pliny the Younger, later wrote in a letter to the historian Tacitus. Around one o’clock, Pliny’s sister asked him to come have a look at a strange dark cloud. Pliny went outside and gazed across the bay, where, less than six miles away loomed Mount Vesuvius. The cloud of superheated ash and stone that had formed above it was moving south, toward Pompeii, as was fast-flowing lava, incinerating everything in its path. It would take centuries for scientists to fully understand that the eruption consisted of molten rock, gases, and pumice ash traveling at a force of one and a half tons per second. Some 1,866 years later, the United States would drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, unleashing a blast whose pressure wave, fire, and radiation killed over sixty-six thousand people—the Vesuvius blast was a hundred thousand times stronger than that. Anyone who didn’t evacuate Pompeii during the first few hours stood no chance of surviving incineration or suffocation or roof collapse or flying rock.
“This phenomenon seemed to a man of such learning and research as my uncle extraordinary and worth further looking into,” wrote Pliny the Younger, an eyewitness who authored the only surviving account. Pliny the Elder summoned a small naval fleet. As he prepared to leave aboard a fast cutter, he received urgent word from Rectina, a friend living near the volcano, who needed rescuing, and who cautioned that the only way out was by sea. His nephew wrote, “He steered his course direct to the point of danger.”
One of the towns along that beautiful coast was Herculaneum, which lay just south of Mount Vesuvius. Herculaneum was closer to the volcano than was Pompeii, but had avoided damage, so far. Then, the winds changed. The searing cloud barreled toward Herculaneum at a hundred miles an hour, burying it in sixty feet of volcanic ruin. Pliny believed he would find his friends farther down the coast, at Stabiae, so on he sailed. The closer he got to shore, the hotter it got. As flaming debris rained down on his boat and “vast fragments” tumbled down the mountain, threatening to block the shore, a crew member told him to turn back.
“Fortune favors the brave,” Pliny answered, and ordered the crew on.
He went ashore at Stabiae and found one of his friends, Pomponianus, but not Rectina. Pomponianus was panicked, so Pliny hugged him and soothed him. Then he had a bath and they all sat down to dinner.
That night, Vesuvius glowed red in the dark, and the cinder and rock continued to fall. Most of the people in Pliny’s party were too nervous to sleep, but Pliny snored so loudly the servants could hear him from outside.
He woke in the night as the courtyard filled with so much ash and stone that it threatened to block any escape. Houses were being “rocked from side to side with frequent and violent concussions as though shaken from their very foundations.” The roof groaned with the weight of a growing load of stone. Deciding that they would be safer outdoors, Pliny’s party fled for the open fields with pillows tied to their heads. That didn’t save Pomponianus, who was struck by a flying rock and died.
By now it was day but the ash cloud made it dark as night. Torches moved through the gloom. Pliny ran to the beach to see if he could sail. The winds were still too strong and the waters “extremely high, and boisterous.” When Pliny said he felt weak, his men spread out sailcloth for him to sit on and brought him two cups of cold water. Then “the flames, preceded by a strong whiff of sulphur, dispersed the rest of the party, and obliged him to rise,” his nephew wrote. “He raised himself up with the assistance of two of his servants, and instantly fell down dead.”
Three days later, after the air had cleared, Pliny’s men returned to where they had last seen him, and found his corpse buried beneath pumice. “His body was found entire,” his nephew told Tacitus, “and without any marks of violence upon it, in the dress in which he fell, and looking more like a man asleep than dead.”
That was the end for Pliny but not for his work. Natural History would canonize the idea that nature wasn’t just a part of life; it was life.
13. The vipers of Malta: Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors. For a treat, see Agostino Scilla’s writings on Malta, published in 1670 in his treatise Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense.
14. “dug up”: In 1565, a Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner, published On Fossil Objects (De Rerum Fossilium), which, to the British geologist and science historian Martin J. S. Rudwick, signaled the beginning of the discipline to be called paleontology. The term “initially included minerals, interesting concretions, and curiosities, as well as organic remains,” the University of Pennsylvania paleontologist Peter Dodson wrote in the introduction to Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. He continued, “Rudwick emphasized the difficulty of the task of interpreting ancient remains. Nothing in nature comes with a label attached...”
15. “For using dragon’s bones”: Ernest Ingersoll, Dragons and Dragon Lore (New York: Payson & Clarke Ltd., 1928), a signed copy of which sells, used, for nearly four hundred dollars.
16. “How can so many Americans still disbelieve in evolution?”: Kevin Holden Platt, “Dinosaur Fossils Part of Longtime Chinese Tonic,” National Geographic News, July 13, 2007.
17. For more on Steno, see Troels Kardel and Paul Maquet, eds., Nicolaus Steno: Biography and Original Papers of a 17th Century Scientist (New York: Springer, 2013); and Alan Cutler, The Seashell on the Mountaintop. In a synopsis of Steno’s significance, UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology notes that at first a mission to understand Earth’s layers “may not seem like important work, but
consider this: if you wanted to know about the evolution of life on Earth, you would need a fairly accurate timeline. Questions such as: ‘How long did something stay the same?’ or ‘How fast did it change?’ can only be assessed in the context of time.” See http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu.
18. “pass over without regard”: Robert Hooke, The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke. (London: Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1705).
19. “a solid naturally enclosed in a solid”: Nicolaus Steno, De Solido intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus [Forerunner to a Dissertation on a Solid Naturally Contained within a Solid] (1669). This quote is found in a number of texts on Steno, including Martin J. S. Rudwick’s The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology, and Donald Prothero’s Bringing Fossils to Life: An Introduction to Paleobiology, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004).
20. “inclined to the horizon” and “continuous over the surface of the Earth”: Ibid.
21. “pointing to a hillside”: Gould and Purcell, Finders, Keepers. Gould was a Harvard evolutionary theorist known for both his brilliance and his arrogance, the New York Times reported when he died in 2002, of cancer. “An entertaining writer credited with saving the dying art form of the scientific essay, Dr. Gould often pulled together unrelated ideas or things,” the Times noted. His “research, lectures, and prolific output of essays helped to reinvigorate the field of paleontology.” See Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Stephen Jay Gould, 60, Is Dead,” New York Times, May 21, 2002.
22. Earth’s age: A 2014 Gallup poll found that four in ten Americans believed God created the earth between six thousand and ten thousand years ago. “Religious, less educated, and older respondents were likelier to espouse a young Earth creationist view,” Live Science reported, adding, “While most Americans have a healthy respect for science, many could use a refresher course in the basics.” See Tia Ghose, “4 in 10 Americans Believe God Created Earth 10,000 Years ago,” by Live Science, June 5, 2014. By May 2017, Gallup was reporting that the percentage of U.S. adults who believed “God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so—the strict creationist view” had dropped to 38 percent. Most now believed in “some form of evolution.” See Art Swift, “In U.S., Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low,” Gallup News, May 22, 2017. The AMNH paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote in Fossils and the History of Life, “There is no necessary conflict between religion and science. Among religions, only the bigoted fundamentalist sects have a dogma condemning evolution. Many religious teachers and laymen accept the fact of evolution. Many evolutionists are religious. Evolutionists may also be creationists, but in a very different and truer sense than that of those who call themselves creationists....The concept of evolution suggests, and the fossil record confirms, that all organisms, past and present, are parts of one extremely long and extremely branching family tree. Life on earth is a single phenomenon with many millions of manifestations. From this widened point of view, Homo sapiens is just one small twig on the tree of life.”
The Dinosaur Artist Page 38