The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  27. “‘Da Bears’”: Larry McShane, “Museum Pays $8.4 Million for T-Rex,” Washington Post, October 5, 1997. See also J. Freedom du Lac, “The T. rex That Got Away: Smithsonian’s Quest for Sue Ends with a Different Dinosaur,” Washington Post, April 5, 2014.

  28. “The day they sold Sue”: Interviews with Kirk Johnson.

  29. “I don’t want to offend”: Ben Marks, “Skeletons in Our Closets: Will the Private Market for Dinosaur Bones Destroy Us All?,” Collectors Weekly, April 24, 2014.

  30. “the smoking gun”: Interviews with Frank Garcia.

  31. “an ever larger”: Letter from Clayton Ray to Frank Garcia, dated July 8, 1992.

  32. “extremists”: Ibid. For more information on the tension between paleontologists and commercial fossil hunters, see “Statement of Principle, Committee on the Guidelines for Paleontological Collecting,” Board of Earth Sciences, National Research Council, 19 National Academy of Sciences, National Academy Press, 1987. See also “Management of Archeological and Paleontological Resources on Federal Lands: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Public Lands, Reserved Water, and Resource Conservation of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-ninth Congress, First Session, on how Effectively the Land Managing Agencies are Carrying Out Their Responsibilities to Manage, Protect, and Preserve Archeological and Paleontological Sites and Objects,” October 14, 1985. The U.S. Government Printing Office published the report in 1986. All these materials are available online.

  33. “Okay, if you not doing the swimming anymore”: Interviews with Doris Prokopi.

  34. “find anything”: Interviews with Eric Prokopi.

  35. “Once you’re dealing”: Interview with Richard Hulbert, FMNH vertebrate collections manager. He said museum staff remembered Prokopi and his hunting buddy as “the two Erics” because they shared a name. The two Erics fell out over fossils at one point and stopped hunting together. “These collectors, they’ll be feuding and fighting and having vendettas against each other for perceived slights—‘You raided my fossil site, blah, blah, blah’—and five years later they’re buddies again,” Hulbert told me. “It’s like bad marriages or something.”

  36. Volunteering at the Florida Museum of Natural History: Eric examined tooth after tooth, labeling each describing each taxon on a paper collection label. “Description of Paleocarcharadon orientalis tooth,” he subject-lined one museum memo, about a pygmy white shark. “The coarsely serrated teeth of P. orientalis are designed for efficient cutting of large prey animals...” “Description of Paleocarcharadon orientalis tooth...” Eric Prokopi memo to Dr. Robert Purdy, October 5, 1994. One dugong bone that he donated was still on display at the FMNH when I visited in the late summer of 2012.

  37. “just basically rocks”: Eric Prokopi said this in our first interview, in 2012, at Serenola, in Gainesville.

  38. He stuck to the rivers: Florida has a long history of divers who search for relics. Scouring the waters of rivers like the Santa Fe, the Aucilla, and the Suwannee, they found thousands of items fashioned out of flint, coral, bone. Some of the finds went to museums, others to private collections, and occasionally the worlds of the hobbyist and the archaeologist overlapped. In one joint project between scientists and sport divers, amateurs “learned the importance of quantitative data and careful record keeping for documenting their archaeological finds,” one study found, in 1996. “This project has had a lasting effect on the good relationship between many of the State’s professionals and amateurs with common archaeological interests.” By early 2014 hunters were swept up in a Florida Fish & Wildlife sting called Operation Timucua and basically charged with collecting out of bounds. For information, see Ben Montgomery, “North Florida Arrowhead Sting: What’s the Point?,” Tampa Bay Times, January 2, 2014. Also Daniel Ruth, “Ridiculous ‘raiders of the lost artifacts,’” Tampa Bay Times, January 10, 2014. Ruth noted that “in one case, a defendant allegedly sold a box of about 90 assorted artifacts to an undercover agent for a grand total of $100—not quite Pablo Escobar territory.” Ruth argued that the state was never able to “produce evidence the defendants ever dug into a state archeological site to obtain any ill-gotten artifacts. Yet several defendants are looking at substantial prison time...” One suspect, William Barton, of Leon County, committed suicide. Ruth wrote, “Breaking a law is not necessarily the same thing as criminality. It’s a concept embodied by Themis, the Greek goddess of holding the scales of justice—an image of compassion and fairness as old as antiquity.”

  39. “The process of building”: The Pony Express, Florida Museum of Natural History newsletter, 1995. To bring fossil skeletons back to “life” is by any measure an act of patience and devotion. Anatomy tells the prepper how the creature looked in life; physics suggests a pose. If the hunter must know how to see, the prepper must learn to envision. I once met a woodcarver on the coast of North Carolina who kept in his yard a pile of white-pine logs. When I asked how he made his beautiful duck decoys he said, “Just cut off the part that ain’t duck.”

  CHAPTER 6: TUCSON

  1. The definitive history of the Tucson gem, mineral, and fossil show is A Fifty-Year History of the Tucson Show, by Bob Jones, a lifelong mineral collector who taught eighth-grade science in Scottsdale. He started collecting as a boy in Connecticut, after visiting the Yale Peabody Museum. His class field trip went to see dinosaurs but it was the minerals that knocked Jones out. One looked like a sword, another like a hedgehog. “I says, ‘My God, look at these things!’ After that, I went home and got my father’s claw hammer and screwdriver—I was gonna set the world on fire, finding minerals,” he told me. “It’s the eye appeal and the thrill of the hunt that makes it such a popular hobby. And it costs you nothing.” By the time I spoke to Jones, in November of 2015, he hadn’t missed a Tucson show in over forty years. For more, see A Fifty-Year History. Details in the Bibliography.

  2. “One does not call Escoffier a chowhound”: Wayne King, “Polished or Not, Rocks Draw Fans,” New York Times, February 17, 1984.

  3. “Museum curators”: Daniel E. Appleman, “Paul E. Desautels (1920–1991),” Rocks & Minerals (January/February 1992).

  4. “curtained off portion”: Jones, A Fifty-Year History.

  5. “quiet closed-door,” “American entrepreneurial spirit,” “sleeping room,” etc.: This comes from both Bob Jones’s book and from my interview with Jones.

  6. “It was pretty much agreed that any mafioso”: Interview with Jones.

  7. “good rocks”: Ibid.

  8. “lap-carried on the plane”: Jones, A Fifty-Year History.

  9. “Museum curators would spread the word”: Interview with Jones.

  10. “New York Stock Exchange”: Sources include “A Wonder-Filled World of Minerals,” by Dan Pavillard, Tucson Daily Citizen; February 7, 1970.

  11. “Some of the things I saw”: See Malcolm W. Browne, “Clash on Fossil Sales Shadows a Trade Fair,” New York Times, February 15, 1994.

  12. “This whole campaign”: Ibid.

  13. “sort of a self-policing thing”: Interview with Jones.

  14. “Okay, what do you got in the bathroom?”: Ibid.

  15. “These are the minerals that are quietly sold”: Ibid.

  16. Economic impact: For more, see “Characteristics and Economic Impact of the Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase Tracking Study,” by FMR Associates Inc., Tucson; Steven Spooner, “Gem Show Travelers Bring Economic Boom to Tucson,” Daily Wildcat, February 6, 2017; and “World’s Biggest Gem Show—$120 Million Economic Impact,” BizDESIGN, Winter 2015.

  17. Big Trade events: Prokopi kept track of the shows on a paper calendar that spanned three years, marking little more in the squares than “Tampa Bay Show,” “Gulfport Show,” “Aurora Show,” “Fossil Mania,” “Paleofest,” “Munich,” “Tucson.” Personal papers of Eric Prokopi.

  18. “I just dove” and “Today, in spite of his young age”: This comes from an article that either Doris or Eric Prokopi cl
ipped and saved. The newspaper and date are unknown, but it’s possibly the Lakeland Ledger, published between December 1996 and August 13, 1997.

  19. “I’ve seen it all”: Email from Eric Prokopi to Amanda Graham, September 5, 1999. Papers of Amanda Prokopi.

  20. “Wow!”: Ibid.

  21. “If you want lunch,” etc.: Email from Eric Prokopi to Amanda Graham, September 6, 1999. Papers of Amanda Prokopi.

  22. “spike dogs”: David Zucchino, “1800s-Era Sunken Logs Are Now Treasure; Here Are the Men Who Find Them,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2014.

  23. “I don’t quite know” and deadheading passage: How to Do Florida, Episode 501, Deadhead Logging, produced by How to Do Florida Inc., Crawford Entertainment. Posted to YouTube on July 17, 2014.

  24. “He drives a truck?”: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi and Betty Graham.

  25. “Your constant smile”: This and other details come from Never a Dull Moment, a craft photo book compiled by Jill Hennessy Shea, a Prokopi family friend in Gainesville.

  26. Go big or go home, “good Virginia silver,” “treat your friends,” etc.: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi and Betty Graham.

  27. “Mom, he has Dad’s work ethic!”: Ibid.

  28. “You’ve been hiding that?”: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi.

  29. “I miss you”: Email from Eric Prokopi to Amanda Graham. Papers of Amanda Prokopi.

  30. “Before I met you”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER 7: BIG GAME

  1. Pfff, this is easy: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi.

  2. dump a body: In The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean wrote, “Florida was a different kind of wild than Western wild. The pioneers out west were crossing wide plains and mountain ranges that were too open and endless for one set of eyes to take in. Traveling west across those vacant and monumental spaces made human beings look lonely and puny, like doodles on a blank page. The pioneer-adventurers in south Florida were traveling inward, into a place as dark and dense as steel wool, a place that already held an overabundance of living things. The Florida pioneers had to confront what a dark, dense, overabundant place might have hidden in it. To explore such a place you had to vanish into it.”

  3. “Eric is perfectly proportioned,” etc.: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi.

  4. “Let’s go Friday”: Ibid.

  5. “I don’t love you because you are beautiful”: Note from Eric Prokopi to Amanda Graham. Papers of Amanda Prokopi.

  6. “did you want to get engaged”: Interviews with Amanda and Eric Prokopi.

  7. “commercial paleontologist”: Prokopi-Graham wedding announcements. Papers of Amanda Prokopi.

  8. “Now I’m sure everyone knows”: Amanda Graham’s written wedding toast. Papers of Amanda Prokopi.

  9. “Especially in what I call the good old days”: Interview with Andreas Kerner, September 25, 2014, Branchville, New Jersey.

  10. Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani: ARTnews named the sheikh, the cousin of the ruling emir of Qatar, the world’s top art collector in 2011. As a member of Qatar’s royal family, al-Thani was in charge of developing his country’s museums, including the Natural History Museum. He “wasn’t a big deal in art buying circles—he was massive,” reported the BBC. One UK collectibles dealer, Paul Fraser, wrote, “He always got what he wanted.” The sheikh’s interest in collecting started in boyhood, with stamps, and eventually extended to “Western art, furniture, classic cars, bicycles, meteorites (‘space sculpture’ to collectors), three fossilized dinosaurs acquired in Wyoming, a complete edition of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America,’ and the Graves watch, a handmade gem known among collectors as the holy grail of timepieces...,” the New York Times reported. In 2005 the sheikh was placed on house arrest and stripped of his position on the national culture council after allegedly misusing public funds to buy art and collectibles, charges that eventually were dropped. He died unexpectedly at his home in London on November 9, 2014, cause of death unknown. See Paul Vitello, “Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani, Big-Spending Art Collector, Is Dead,” New York Times, November 17, 2014; Sara Hamdan, “An Emirate Filling up with Artwork,” New York Times, February 29, 2012; Will Gompertz, “Qatari Art Collector Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani Dies,” BBC, November 11, 2014; and Paul Fraser, “The Vast and Spectacular Collections of Sheikh Saud al Thani of Qatar,” paulfrasercollectibles.com, June 8, 2011. David Herskowitz told me al-Thani was a “very good client” and that he brought the sheikh “into the industry.” He said, “When he heard about my auctions he contacted me and started to talk about things that were on the market. He goes, ‘Oh, you can buy this stuff? Can you get me this? Can you get me that?’ So then when my auctions came he was on the phone with me, bidding. He would’ve bought at least seventy-five percent of the auction if I didn’t tell him to stop bidding. That’s the kind of guy I am, by the way. When he’s bidding for an ammonite that I know is a three-hundred-dollar piece and he’s already up to four thousand five hundred dollars, I’m gonna tell him, ‘Okay, Your Highness, please don’t go any further, I’ll get you another one.’”

  11. “Building natural history museums”: Interviews with Kirk Johnson.

  12. “That’s art”: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi.

  13. “National Geographic for your house”: Ibid.

  14. “Eric lives in organized chaos”: Ibid.

  15. Bizarre Bazaar: This show is so popular that at Christmas people make a day of it, renting a limo and wearing matching sweatshirts (“Naughty or Nice?”) and funny, homemade holiday hats. Shoppers are so obsessed, they wait in line for the doors to open as if for concert tickets or Black Friday at Best Buy. Amanda especially liked selling the hand-made jewelry she had taught herself how to make.

  16. Guernsey’s auction: “Dinosaurs & Other Prehistoric Creatures” catalog, June 24, 2004. The auction alarmed paleontologists, and it attracted buyers, from a six-year-old kid who successfully bid on the partial brow bone of Triceratops, to star medical examiner Michael Baden, who bought three Edmontosaurus bones, telling a reporter, “What’s very interesting is how they are similar to our bones today. We probably have eighty percent to eighty-five percent of the same DNA today as these dinosaurs that are extinct.” See John J. Goldman, Los Angeles Times, “An Auction of Prehistoric Proportions,” June 25, 2004.

  17. Sold diamonds in Korea: Interviews with David Herskowitz.

  18. Jurassic Park: The years 1990 to 1993 were a sort of launching point for dinosaurs. First Jurassic Park premiered, following the book by the same name by Michael Crichton. Then Tyrannosaurus Sue sold for over $8 million, launching the first bone rush since the nineteenth-century feud between Marsh and Cope. Also, the Soviet Union was breaking up, which, as you’ll read in later chapters, had an unexpected impact on paleontology.

  19. How could a fly get into a gemstone?: That’s what Herskowitz wondered, but while amber is often considered a gem, it’s actually fossil tree sap. More specifically it’s an example, like ivory, of what the International Gem Society calls organic amorphous materials. See gemsociety.org for more information.

  20. The aunt: Interviews with David Herskowitz.

  21. “People fight over stuff”: Interviews with Herskowitz.

  22. “I loaded up the truck and moved to Bever-ly”: “Hills, that is; swimming pools, movie stars.” See “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme song for the long-running television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, performed by the bluegrass legends Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

  23. “I must have been a good bullshitter”: Interviews with David Herskowitz. For more on the first history auction, see Brian Jerkins, “Natural history auction likely to be a bone-a-fide success,” CNN.com; December 2, 1995.

  24. “Henry was more of a free spirit”: “Henry Galiano’s Got Hundreds of Skeletons in His Closet,” People, January 20, 1986.

  25. “niche within the public’s innate interest”: maxillaandmandible.com.

  26. “If you’ve given someone”: People, “Henry Galiano’s Got Hundreds o
f Skeletons...”

  27. “Everybody lives in apartments”: William R. Greer, “Beneath Columbus Avenue, Bones Become Art,” New York Times, December 20, 1986.

  28. “slaughterhouses”: Ibid.

  29. “buffalo heads”: Ibid.

  30. “There’s no life down here”: Ibid.

  31. “paleontologists, entomologists”: maxillaandmandible.com

  32. GONE DIGGING: “Maxilla & Mandible Closes Its Doors for good,” West Side Rag, August 30, 2011.

  33. “wasn’t just a store,” etc.: Ibid.

  34. Galiano: For Herskowitz, Galiano “cleared the items for auction”: Jerkins, “Natural History Auction...” He once said, “I’m not concerned about the pricing of these things, simply because if you don’t put a value on it, it’s worth nothing.”

  35. Chinese dealers’ advertisements: Eric Prokopi kept most if not all of the Tucson show guides, a review of which provided the detail for this passage.

  36. “You talk to a paleontologist”: Interviews with Kirk Johnson.

  37. “Fellow Fossil Hunters”: According to the letter from Friends of New Jersey State Museum, dated March 2, 2001, the trip cost $4,500 per person and included airfare, lodging, meals, museum admissions, and ground transportation. The group would travel from July 23 to August 3. The letter was signed by W. B. (William) Gallagher, New Jersey State Museum curator and Rider University adjunct professor. Papers of Eric Prokopi. The Liaoning region was hemorrhaging fossils at that point. This wasn’t long after the smallest known theropod dinosaur, Microraptor, had been found in the area, and around the time that a team of Chinese and American Museum of Natural History scientists, led by Ji Qiang and Mark Norell, had announced the discovery, by farmers, of a 130-million-year-old fossil dinosaur that had been covered entirely in primitive feathers and downy fluff. Nothing like it had ever been seen, and Norell later said the small, fleet dromeosaur offered “the best evidence yet that animals developed feathers for warmth before they could fly.” See Cliff Tarpy, “Keeping an ear cocked for voices in the dark,” National Geographic, August 2005.