The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  23. “observation over speculation”: John Woodward, “An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals, and Also of the Sea, Rivers, and Springs” (London: A. Bettesworth, W. Taylor, 1723).

  24. “I do not know how the sea was able to reach so far inland”: Agostino Scilla, La Vana Speculazione Disingannata dal Senso [Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense] (Naples, Italy, 1670). At the end of his treatise, Scilla added thirty beautiful, engraved plates bearing the images of fossils, “figures that enhance the intrinsic beauty of fossils, with an artist’s sense of balance and placement,” Stephen Jay Gould wrote. The Sedgwick Museum at Cambridge University houses these, along with Scilla’s surviving specimens and plates. They represent some of the earliest intersections of art and science.

  25. “Here’s what makes him a hero”: David Quammen, “A Passion for Order,” National Geographic, June 2007. For more on Linnaeus as our holotype, also see David Notton and Chris Stringer, “Who Is the Type of Homo sapiens?,” International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.

  26. “so full of fossils and chemical apparatus”: Edmond A. Mathez, Earth: Inside and Out (New York: The New Press, 2001).

  27. “The mind seemed to grow giddy”: “Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton, F.R.S. Edin.,” read by John Playfair, January 10, 1803, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In Fossils and the History of Life, George Gaylord Simpson introduced me to a new word: chronophobiac, coined by the historian and philosopher of geology Claude Albritton in The Abyss of Time (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Company, 1980). Albritton was referring to those who “cringe in fear when pondering geological time,” Simpson wrote.

  28. “no vestige of a beginning”: James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: 1795). A full reading can be found at gutenberg.org. The last sentence of volume I reads, “...we shall thus be led to admire the wisdom of nature, providing for the continuation of this living world, and employing those very means by which, in a more partial view of things, this beautiful structure of an inhabited earth seems to be necessarily going into destruction.”

  29. “Consider the Earth’s history”: John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981). McPhee’s masterwork on geology started in the pages of The New Yorker and is collected in his book Annals of the Former World. See Bibliography.

  30. geologic chart: See “International Chronostratigraphic Chart,” International Commission on Stratigraphy, stratigraphy.org. There, you can also see a slideshow of gorgeous, extreme stratigraphy like the Grand Canyon.

  31. “Digging into Florida’s Past”: Bone Valley Fossil Society newsletters, personal papers of Eric Prokopi, provided to author. The contents of a collection of these newsletters informs other passages in this chapter. Other information was found in the Tampa Bay Fossil Club Chronicles newsletter, January 2001. Papers of Eric Prokopi. Frank Garcia was one of the club’s founders. Its sponsors included the University of South Florida Department of Geology, the Leisey Shell Corp., and Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry.

  32. “riding the couch”: Tampa Bay Fossil Club Chronicles, April 2001. Papers of Eric Prokopi.

  33. “Why Janey and Johnny”: In November 1991, Dr. Warren Allmon, then a University of South Florida geologist, complained in the Tampa Bay newsletter that students and Americans in general knew appallingly little about evolution, “the most basic and important theory in all of biology,” because they had been exposed to the concept “only briefly and inaccurately, if at all.” Allmon was an entertaining regular in the newsletter. In one issue he critiqued Baltimore’s aquarium and other national aquaria as misleadingly incomplete and inaccurate. “If we communicate that a rainforest can be ‘built’ with some plants and mist and a sloth, and a coral reef with some fish and fiberglass, then we run the risk of communicating the idea that these systems are not really distinct, complicated, or special,” he wrote, adding that “if we destroy them we can easily fix them if only Disney imagineers could have a go at it.” And when critiquing the World of Energy exhibit at Disney’s Epcot Center, he ridiculed the public presentation of dinosaurs and their world as “so outdated, so cliche, so outstandingly awful, that it cancels out any possible positive effect.” Why were all the sauropods still standing in swamps? Where were the herbivores? “If, when we think of the past, the first image that comes to mind is of a hellish place of dragons and giants, then we will find difficult to accept the idea that we can study it scientifically,” he wrote. “The Mesozoic was neither a time of smiling Flintstones-type dinosaurs nor of aliens from another world. It was neither extreme of the pendulum’s swing, the assertions of Hollywood (and its surrogates in Orlando) notwithstanding. It was our world, the one we now inhabit.”

  34. “The word dinosaur”: Roy Chapman Andrews, All About Dinosaurs. Andrews’s other popular children’s books included In the Days of the Dinosaurs (New York: Scholastic, 1975) and All About Strange Beasts of the Past (New York: Random House, 1956).

  CHAPTER 5: DEAL

  1. Dell’historia naturale, (Naples, Italy: Nella stamparia à Porta Reale per Costantino Vitale, 1599). The fold-out engraving is something to see, and the cabinet itself must have been even more so, anchored by that ceiling croc. “Crocodiles were popular in the cabinets of curiosities because of their extravagant size and monstrous appearance and because they were enigmatic dwellers of both land and water,” John E. Simmons wrote in Museums: A History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016).

  2. “antlers, horns, claws”: Gabriel Kaltemarckt, “Bedenken wie eine Kunst-cammer Aufzurichten seyn Möchte” [Thoughts on how a kunstkammer should be formed], 1587, reprinted in Susan Pearce, Rosemary Flanders, and Fiona Morton, The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting, vol. 2, wherein Kaltemarckt’s work was called a “classic text in the museological tradition.”

  3. “fast-walking messenger” and other Peter the Great matter: Gould and Purcell, Finders, Keepers.

  4. “Order Proboscidea”: Bone Valley Fossil News, the newsletter of the Bone Valley Fossil Society, October 1991. Papers of Eric Prokopi.

  5. You shoult go get toes shocks: Interviews with Doris Prokopi.

  6. “Eric is a very conscientious guy”: Rod Gipson, “Making Waves: LOL’s Prokopi Plans to Become Gator Swimmer,” Tampa Tribune, June 3, 1992.

  7. Les mauvaises terres: If you ever have some time to kill, see the twelve-volume Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, made under the direction of the U.S. Secretary of War in 1853–4, for the U.S. Congress. Beverley Tucker, Printer, Washington, DC, 1855. Published by the Government Printing Office, 1855–61. The University of Michigan calls the reports a “cornerstone piece of Americana.” The details are wonderful. As one artist sketched California pectins he was stung by a mother scorpion with a load of babies on her back. Parties passed through places called Bed Dog, Gouge Eye, and Dutch Flat. Everyone was urged to carry a geological hammer; no. 9 birdshot; 5 gallons of alcohol and blotting papers, for pressing plants; arsenic in 2-pound tea canisters, for treating the moist flesh of fresh kills; and a butcher knife, needle, and thread, for “skinning and sewing up animals.” The correspondents often mentioned fossils but without much detail. (“Fossils of the cretaceous or jurassic formation were found in the creeks crossed to-day.”) On a brackish stretch of the Colorado River, one party found seashells on hilltops. Near Sacramento, gypsum caves of “dazzling whiteness.” In the Rio Grande Valley, horizontal strata of sandstones and limestones. Fossil ferns near a coal seam not far from Fort Belknap, Montana. Fossil oysters near the Llano River. Concretions “as big as oranges” on a tributary of the Missouri. On the Posuncula River they found shark teeth, bone fragments, and fossil wood 500 feet above sea level, seeing for themselves that strata may appear as horizontal as cake layers or as pitched as a funhouse floor. See http://www.cpr
r.org/Museum/Pacific_RR_Surveys/.

  8. “very skeleton”: Ibid. By then, paleontology had been a word since 1822, having been coined as palaeontologie in Journal de Phisique, in France.

  9. “Women of great age”: Reports of Exploration and Surveys.

  10. “From the uniform”: Ibid.

  11. Larson brothers: Peter was inspired by a local fossil collector named June Culp Zeitner, who started a dozen gem and mineral clubs and encouraged all the U.S. states to each adopt an official gem, mineral, fossil, and/or rock. At the International Gem Show of 1976 she was named the “First Lady of Gems” at age ninety, and received a prestigious award from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. For more information, see Steve Fiffer’s Tyrannosaurus Sue and Peter Larson’s memoir Rex Appeal: The Amazing Story of Sue, the Dinosaur That Changed Science, the Law, and My Life (Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2012), coauthored by Kristin Donnan, with a foreword by the paleontologist Robert Bakker.

  12. Black Hills Institute: Pete Larson’s business partners included his brother, Neal, and an old college friend, Bob Farrar.

  13. Rock shops and backyard museums in general: In his book Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, the Smithsonian’s Kirk Johnson tells a story about a commercial hunter named Lee Campbell, who had “sold a nearly complete ankylosaur to the Hayashibara Museum in Japan.” After Johnson saw the skeleton “laid out in the backyard of a Tucson hotel in 1991” Campbell asked him and the illustrator Ray Troll, “Do you want to go to church?” Johnson wrote, “Lee led us to a mildly dilapidated white wooden church. The pews had been removed and replaced with large shelves that sagged beneath the weight of dinosaur bones. The choir area was full of plaster jackets. Workbenches laden with partially cleaned bones lined the walls. Dinosaur skeletons were the only active members of this congregation....We asked Lee how he’d ended up in this particular situation, and he told us that he was being bankrolled by a Kentucky dentist who loved digging fossils more than cleaning teeth.”

  14. “I don’t know if it’s a sixth sense”: Sue Hendrickson with Kimberly Weinberger, Hunt for the Past: My Life as an Explorer (New York: Scholastic, 2001). Hendrickson grew up in Munster, Indiana. As a child she was so shy her mother would drop her off at birthday parties and return to find her still sitting alone on the doorstep, having never gone inside. She earned all A’s in school, and in Girl Scouts she learned to love nature. “People often ask me whether my interest in searching for buried items started in childhood. The answer is yes,” she once wrote. “My earliest memory of finding ‘treasure’ is when I was around four years old”: in a pile of alley garbage she found a brass perfume bottle embellished with a tiny white heart. Eventually Hendrickson dropped out of school and hit the road with her boyfriend and wound up in the Florida Keys, diving for tropical fish to sell to aquariums and pet shops. Then a friend asked her to help raise a sunken freighter, and she started working as a shipwreck salvager. In 1974, after earning her GED in Seattle, she traveled to the Dominican Republic to work a shipwreck and discovered amber mining, marveling that a golden tomb could fit in the palm of a hand. Seeing an amber-trapped creature was “almost like looking at a photograph taken 23 million years ago,” she later wrote in a memoir. Hendrickson taught herself entomology, which helped her identify which amber specimens would most interest scientists. Returning to the Dominican Republic again and again, she searched miners’ slag piles, bought the best pieces, and sold them to universities and museums, later expanding her search to Chiapas, Mexico. It’s said that only six butterflies have ever been found in amber, and that Hendrickson found three of them. On the day she checked out the bluff near Faith she was walking with her golden retriever, Gypsy. Only twelve T. rex skeletons existed at the time and Pete Larson had never seen a T. rex in the ground, but he recognized the honeycomb texture of the materials as camellate, a distinctive structure found in the bones of theropods. Dinosaur bone is porous; if you touch it to your tongue, it sticks. This stuck.

  15. “swallowed my kids”: Larson and Donnan, Rex Appeal.

  16. FBI raid: Descriptions derive from Peter Larson’s memoir, Rex Appeal; the extensive news coverage of the seizure of Tyrannosaurus Sue; and my interviews with Vince Santucci, a U.S. National Park Service paleontologist and senior geologist who was once called the nation’s only “pistol-packing paleontologist.” Investigators were getting tougher because “they believed that an arrest of a collector with a high profile might deter others from stealing fossils from public lands,” Steve Fiffer wrote in Tyrannosaurus Sue. At one point Santucci said, “In a way, the dealers are protecting the fossils, but they’re destroying their research value by not letting scientists do it.”

  17. “divided on this issue”: Fiffer, Tyrannosaurus Sue.

  18. “unanimous in condemnation”: Ibid.

  19. “extremists”: Ibid. Bob Bakker’s groundbreaking book The Dinosaur Heresies, which portrayed some dinosaurs as agile and fleet, was a bestseller in the 1970s, ushering in a “renewed fascination in science—and a higher demand for fossils,” as Larson and Donnan put it in Rex Appeal. Like his Yale teacher John Ostrom, who, in the 1960s revolutionized dinosaur science by picking up the century-old argument of Thomas Henry Huxley that dinosaurs had more in common with birds than reptiles, Bakker believed it scientifically dangerous, and wrong, to exclude amateur hunters from paleontology.

  20. “fell from his head”: Larson and Donnan, Rex Appeal.

  21. “‘the real sciences’”: Ibid.

  22. Guilty: The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act passed in 2009, providing the first unified measures and criminal penalties against illicit fossil collecting; but when the Sue case came along there was no relevant statute on fossils. The Larson brothers and other BHI associates were charged with violating the Antiquities Act of 1906, which protects “any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity, situated on lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States.” In Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, Kirk Johnson wrote that “a swarm of lawyers started getting paid to think about the legalities of dinosaur ownership.” In Tyrannosaurus Sue, Steve Fiffer noted that seven of the twelve jurors who convicted Peter Larson later held a news conference in which they said that if they “had it to do all over again, they would now acquit the defendants of everything.” One juror publicly criticized federal prosecutors for “spending millions of dollars on a glorified trespassing case.” In the media, the pervasive story was binary, Larson later wrote: “We were scientists; we were shifty fossil brokers with no scientific sensibilities. We were law-abiding, simple ranch boys making a living; we were sophisticated thieves and liars. We saved precious bits of history; we took advantage of history and people to make a buck.” Everywhere he went, some well-meaning person tried to offer legal advice. With more than a little hyperbole, he noted that the case “eventually would be described in the same breath in our part of the country as Waco or Ruby Ridge.” Johnson, the Smithsonian chief, once speculated that Larson legally collected enough bones at one site, on the South Dakota property of an old rancher and lifelong fossil collector named Ruth Mason, to make “fifty or so” Edmontosaurus skeletons alone. He wrote, “Regardless of how history treats him, Pete Larson will go down in the books as one of the most prolific dinosaur hunters of all time.”

  23. “unspeakably fresh”: Rita Reif, “Declaration of Independence Found in a $4 Picture Frame,” New York Times, April 3, 1991.

  24. “The Declaration of Independence is just a piece of paper”: James Barron, “Public Lives; He’s Auctioned the 1776 Declaration, Twice,” New York Times, July 4, 2000. Redden also said, “If it’s the right property, the right circumstance, people are desperate to buy.” See Lynn Douglass, “Legendary Sotheby’s Auctioneer Talks Selling Duchess of Windsor’s Jewels, Magna Carta,” Forbes, July 3, 2012.

  25. “world treasure”: See “A Dinosaur in Manhattan? T. Rex Fossil Goes on Block at Sotheby’s,” Associated Press, September 28, 1997. For
the sales catalog, the paleontologist Philip Currie, by this time curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, described Sue as the “standard against which other dinosaurs are measured” (Fiffer, Tyrannosaurus Sue).

  26. McDonald’s and Disney: The two corporations had recently launched a long-term marketing partnership—the restaurant chain was to sponsor the DinoLand USA exhibit at Disney World’s new Animal Kingdom park in Orlando. A Disney communications executive thought a cast of Sue would make a great centerpiece for Year 2000 promotions, saying, “I had been struck by something Bill Clinton had said about the millennium: ‘If you are interested in celebrating the future, try to honor the past’” (Fiffer, Tyrannosaurus Sue).