The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  38. “ANOTHER AWESOME”: Eric Prokopi eBay archives, which I pulled in 2012.

  39. “We had a ball at Lowes”: Annual holiday newsletter, papers of Amanda Prokopi.

  40. “This is not a tire store”: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi.

  41. “dive into adulthood”: Holiday newsletter.

  42. Giant ground sloths: Prokopi sold one sloth to Mace Brown, an investor and financial planner from the Charleston area. It is a mark of the interconnectedness of the scientific and commercial fossil worlds that Brown is friends with Bolor Minjin’s husband, Jonathan Geisler, a South Carolina native and a paleontologist who went on to teach on Long Island, New York. Brown started collecting natural history in middle school: rocks first, and later fossils. After amassing more than three thousand objects he decided he needed “an endgame,” and created the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History at the College of Charleston. It’s located on the second floor of the School of Sciences and Mathematics Building. At least one of the Prokopi’s finds can be seen there.

  43. “unusual” stuff: Various interviews, mostly with dealers.

  44. Micanopy: The Timucua tribe inhabited the area before Hernando de Soto showed up in 1539. Michael J. Fox’s 1991 movie Doc Hollywood was shot there.

  45. See Barbara A. Beasley, “Appendix B: Paleontological Damage Assessment and Commercial Value Determination for Commercially Valuable Fossil Resources Seized in the Paleontological Violation Case No. 03-02-7453733,” USDA Forest Service, November 2003.

  46. “biggest amethyst druse”: See Andreas Guhr’s biography at http://www.earth dancer.co.uk/authors/andreas-guhr/.

  47. “This extremely valuable log”: redgallery.com

  48. “led expeditions”: Ibid.

  49. “What a magical word!”: Uwe George, “Das Grab der Drachen (The Grave of the Dragons),” GEO, July 1993.

  50. “A new kind of dragon hunter,” etc.: Ibid.

  51. “QVC’s Indiana Jones”: Interview with Tom Lindgren.

  52. “art of presentation” and “People come here every year”: Ibid.

  53. “their own private time”: Ibid.

  54. “You’d shake his hand”: Ibid. Lindgren had moved to Tucson by the time I talked to him at the booth of his company, GeoDecor. “I don’t think Eric meant to be bad. I don’t think Eric meant to be the black side,” he told me. “I think in his heart everything was good intentions. He wanted to have the right to live the American dream, which is: You work hard and you make a discovery, or whatever. But he also was naive enough to believe what he’d been told: It’s legal and free to have this.” I asked why anyone would risk it. “Because the potential payback was huge,” Lindgren said. It has to be about more than money, I said. Lindgren said, “There’s some prestige that comes along with selling a million-dollar fossil: ‘Here’s the guy that can sell the big items. This is the guy that when we have something major, let’s go to him and get him to sell it for us.’ It’s the approval and admiration of your peers.”

  CHAPTER 8: MIDDLEMAN IN JAPAN

  1. Dinosaur: The documented history of dinosaur discoveries began in the 1600s in the quarries of Stonesfield, in the county of Oxfordshire, England. The aptly named village produced extraordinary slate. Mining usually began around the holiday of Michaelmas, at the end of September, and continued until Christmas: quarriers hauled large blocks, or pendles, to the surface and covered them with dirt or water, to keep them moist. At the onset of a hard frost the mine operators sounded the church bells, summoning men to come spread out the rock, exposing it to the elements. The absorbed water froze and thawed, froze and thawed, a cycle that split the stone thinly into slabs that proved useful, and beautiful, as roof tiles. “One week of hard frost in January ensured well-split slates and plenty of work to keep the ‘slatters’—the men who shaped and holed the thin layers to produce the batchelors, whippets, muffities, short, middle, and large cocks used for roofing tiles—in employment until the following Michaelmas,” Nina Morgan, a geologist, wrote for the Geological Society of London. Stonesfield slate could be seen in roofscapes throughout the Cotswolds and, nearer by, at Oxford University. Stonesfield sat at the crest of an escarpment on the River Evenlode. The quarried slate was actually a middle Jurassic limestone from the Taynton formation, which lay packed with a wealth of “marine exuviae” that included fossil shark teeth, nautili, scales, spines, and ammonites, but also trees and ferns and seeds and reeds and branches and leaves. In 1676, someone found a fossil fragment measuring 2 feet long and 15 inches in diameter, and weighing almost 20 pounds. Doubly bulbous at one end, the fragment would someday be temporarily (and quite erroneously, if colorfully) called “Scrotum humanum,” but for now no one could even guess what the thing was, which was Iguanodon, one of the three first dinosaur discoveries, which eventually led the British zoologist Richard Owen to a pivotal conclusion. Comparing the bulbous wonder with two other specimens found in England, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus, he decided they were all similar enough to each other—and different enough from everything else—to deserve their own grouping. Drawing on the Greek terms for “terrible” (deinos) and “lizard” (sauros), he created the umbrella term Dinosauria, thus giving humankind a new word, and a new world: dinosaur. The other key players here were the country doctor Gideon Mantell and his wife, Mary Ann, both of whom are credited with discovering Iguanodon and Robert Plot, a chemistry professor at Oxford and the first curator at the university’s Ashmolean Museum of natural history. Plot had been working on a systematic study of local fossils, rocks, and minerals for his book, Natural History of Oxfordshire. (His sketches—of “Moon-stone,” “Thunder-bolts,” “Cockle-stones,” and “Stones resembling parts of Men, or things of Art”—were some of the earliest and most beautiful examples of illustrated fossils.) After receiving the bulbous object he sketched it and included it in his book, in what may have been the first published illustration of a dinosaur fossil. I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you at least a little about the influential William Buckland, who grew up fossil hunting on the Dorset coast, at the coastal bluffs of exposed Triassic and Jurassic limestone and shale at Lyme and Charmouth. The cliffs were his “geological school,” Buckland wrote, saying, “They stared me in the face, they wooed me and caressed me, saying at every turn, pray, pray be a geologist.” In 1801, he started at Oxford. Graduating in 1808, he became both an ordained minister and a geologist. Full-lipped and cleft-chinned, Buckland hunted fossils on a black mare, keeping his specimens and rock hammers in a large blue saddlebag. He became Oxford’s first professor of geology. His lectures were popular with students and faculty for their weirdness and passion. “He paced like a Franciscan preacher up and down behind a long showcase...He had in his hand a huge hyaena’s skull,” one former student wrote. “He suddenly dashed down the steps—rushed skull in hand at the first undergraduate on the front bench and shouted ‘What rules the world?’ The youth, terrified, threw himself against the next back seat, and answered not a word. He rushed then on to me, pointing the hyaena full in my face—‘What rules the world?’ ‘Haven’t an idea,’ I said. ‘The stomach, sir,’ he cried (again mounting the rostrum) ‘rules the world. The great ones eat the less, the less the lesser still.’” Buckland became known for “zoophagy,” a nineteenth century fad wherein people tried unusual foods. Buckland quite simply would eat anything, including, supposedly, a puppy. He dined on the flesh of a porpoise head (it tasted like “broiled lamp wick”) and earwigs (“horribly bitter”), and was said to have licked strange drippings off a church floor and declared the “martyr’s blood” nothing but bat urine. It stretches the imagination to think that the following really occurred, as recounted by the author Augustus Hare: “Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ and before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was l
ost for ever.” Charles Darwin wasn’t impressed. “Though very good-humoured and good-natured [he] seemed to me a vulgar and almost coarse man,” Darwin wrote of Buckland. “He was incited more by a craving for notoriety, which sometimes made him act like a buffoon, than by a love of science.” It was Buckland who identified the bulbous Stonesfield bone as Megalosaurus. At this point an international network of geologists and paleontologists was taking shape, with many of the scientists attached to museums and universities, their ideas circulating with increasing speed thanks to rapid improvements in the printing and distribution of newspapers and magazines. Georges Cuvier, celebrated and sought after as the father of paleontology, began to mentor a young English geologist named Charles Lyell. Noting that England was more “parson-ridden” than any of Europe’s countries except Spain, Lyell declared his intention to “free the sciences from Moses.” Building upon James Hutton’s concept of deep time, Lyell described a planet that underwent slow changes over long periods time and published it in The Principles of Geology. The geology book became a bestseller. Public demand took Lyell from England to America, where thousands of people sought tickets to one Boston appearance alone.

  2. “happy tourist”: Hollis Butts’s public Facebook page.

  3. “bone wars”: E. D. Cope—slender and handsome, with a wide English mustache—was a hotheaded Quaker and the brusque young son of a Philly shipping magnate. He had taught himself paleontology by studying with the esteemed University of Pennsylvania anatomist Joseph Leidy at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the country’s first natural history organization. Marsh—beefy and balding, with a brushy beard—was nine years Cope’s elder. Growing up poor on a farm in Lockport, New York, he had become fascinated by fossils and collected them. Marsh was thinking about becoming a carpenter or a teacher when his millionaire uncle, George Peabody, a London financier, plucked him off the farm and sponsored his education at Phillips Exeter Academy and then at Yale, where he was able to pursue his true interests and kept his “large mineral and fossil collection under lock and key.” Marsh and Cope became friends after meeting in Berlin. Marsh was the shy and methodical one, Cope the brash, fast one. Marsh noticed geological formations; Cope noticed beauty. Marsh’s men carried guns; Cope refused offers of firearms despite working in remote, dangerous areas. Marsh was funded; Cope came from a patrician family but had nothing. Both men paid skilled fossil hunters like Charles Sternberg to prospect and excavate on their behalf, but both also went into the field. Marsh took an unpaid faculty position at Yale as the nation’s first chair of paleontology, securing his future by persuading his generous uncle to make an endowment founding what is now the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Cope, devoted to the Academy of Natural Sciences, taught at Princeton. They died within two years of each other in the late 1890s; by that time their rivalry very nearly embodied Tennyson’s poetic notion of “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” But the competitiveness produced amazing new specimens, including Marsh’s important discovery of a primitive bird with teeth, a find that supported the ideas of Charles Darwin and “Darwin’s bulldog,” the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who suspected birds evolved from creatures not unlike dinosaurs. Cope ultimately discovered fifty-six species of dinosaur, and Marsh discovered eighty-six, including Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Camarasaurus. “Americans have always felt inferior to Europeans—culturally, politically, economically,” Steven Conn, a historian, once said. Paleontology finally seemed to be the place where Americans could “be better than the Europeans.” During the bone wars there was an obvious commercial market for fossil vertebrates, with “Professor Marsh himself as the most active figure in that market,” Charles Schuchert and Clara Mae LeVene wrote in O.C. Marsh, Pioneer in Paleontology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940). The best source on the Marsh-Cope bone wars is The Gilded Dinosaur, by Mark Jaffe. Disclosure: Jaffe and I are friends; but no matter what, I would feel the same about his deeply reported, beautifully written book. This chapter owes a debt to the detailed research Jaffe produced in telling his important story about two of the most pioneering, influential (and altogether colorful) figures of the nineteenth century. You can see him talk about Marsh and Cope in Dinosaur Wars, an American Experience documentary by PBS (WGBH; January 17, 2011.)

  4. First major dinosaur site: Two Union Pacific Railroad workers tipped Marsh off about fossils that “extend for seven miles & are by the ton at Como Bluff.” In a letter one told him, “We are working men and not able to present them as a gift...” See John Ostrom, Marsh’s Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff.

  5. “It was Jurassic Park finally”: PBS, Dinosaur Wars.

  6. Bone Cabin Quarry: Up the road is Sinclair—the town and the oil company. The company still uses the green Brontosaurus-looking creature as a mascot. The connection goes way back. Sinclair had papier mâché dinosaurs at the 1933–34 Chicago World’s Fair. Spinoff projects included dinosaur stamp books, “Brontosaurus” soap, and partnerships wherein the company donated geological materials to libraries and schools. Another, larger, exhibit followed, at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair; the dinosaurs were based on the research of AMNH’s Barnum Brown and Yale’s John Ostrom. One autumn day in 1963, crowds of New Yorkers gathered at the Battery to watch nine fiberglass dinosaurs pass the Statue of Liberty on a barge marked “Sinclair Dinosaurs on Way to N.Y. World’s Fair.” After that, the models went on tour, then to permanent homes at national monuments, state parks, and other sites in six states, although the Ornitholestes was stolen and never recovered.

  7. “erecting such a skeleton”: See Phil Roberts, “The Builder of the ‘World’s Oldest Cabin,’” University of Wyoming Department of History, uwyo.edu.

  8. “the world’s oldest building,” etc.: Ibid.

  9. Bone Cabin closed: At one point, Eric Prokopi went to see Bone Cabin because he heard it was for sale. The owner wouldn’t sell to a commercial hunter, but Prokopi enjoyed seeing the attraction, Como Bluff, and Medicine Bow. The town is known as the setting for Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian, considered the first significant Western of the genre. Wister dedicated the book to Theodore Roosevelt and began with a note to the reader, saying that “Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was a colony as wild as Virginia had been a hundred years earlier, with the same primitive joys and dangers. There were, to be sure, not so many Chippendale settees.” On the day I stopped by Bone Cabin, in 2016, everything was shut down, including the house where Boylan once lived. The stables were empty, the weeds high. Inside Bone Cabin I could see trash strewn about; the glass display case was broken. Security cameras, if they worked, watched whomever rolled up to have a look.

  10. “With nothing much to do”: Hollis Butts’s public Facebook page.

  11. “true America”: Ibid.

  12. “Breithaupt is active”: Ibid.

  13. “Well, I was the scumbag”: Ibid.

  14. “The seas came in”: Willow Belden, “A Conversation with BLM Paleontologist Brent Breithaupt,” Wyoming Public Media, March 29, 2013. This seven-minute radio interview is worth your time. Hear Breithaupt, a Bureau of Land Management paleontologist based in Cheyenne, talk about his mandate to protect fossils found on federal lands, and about Wyoming’s wealth of prehistory, including trackways laid down in the middle Jurassic, 165 million years ago, when, as he puts it, hundreds of small to medium-size meat-eating dinosaurs walked across an ancient tidal flat, “leaving their footprints.”

  15. “I had a map”: Hollis Butts’s public Facebook page. Other details about Butts come from the Pacifica High School yearbook and U.S. military and census records.

  16. “really old” Japanese furniture: Hollis Butts told me this in an email by cutting and pasting one of his Facebook posts, which noted that he also sold “minerals (to a lesser extent) and a lot of ‘nature goods’ (ostrich eggs, for example).” He told me he moved to Japan after being “kicked out of Iran (where I had been working) after the revolution.” He traveled Asia
until he had “almost no money left and then decided that Japan might be a good place to work.” He hunted fossils as a child when his father was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas (nearby there are “outcroppings of chalky soft Cretaceous rock full of shells”), and later hunted in Germany (“black Jurassic shale”). “Years later, while living in Japan, I was on a vacation in the US with my family, and at Ouray, Colorado, I chanced into the Columbine Rock Shop, a place full of interesting fossils. I thought I should be selling fossils in Japan.”

  17. “Is life now so regulated”: Hollis Butts’s public Facebook page.

  18. “for being able to solve”: John Colapinto, “Brain Games: The Marco Polo of Neuroscience,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2009.

  19. “You buy it”: Rex Dalton, “Paper Sparks Fossil Fury: Paleontologists Criticize Publication of Specimen with Questionable Origin,” Nature news, February 2, 2009.

  20. “bull-like appearance”: See Clifford A. Miles and Clark J. Miles, “Skull of Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani, a new Cretaceous ankylosaur from the Gobi Desert,” Current Science 96, 1 (January 10, 2009).

  21. “laws were indeed broken”: Dalton, “Paper Sparks Fossil Fury.” Nature noted that there was “no clear paper trail that guarantees the fossil was acquired through legal channels” and quoted AMNH’s Mark Norell, who complained that it was “totally inappropriate to publish on this specimen; it is stolen patrimony.” Another story about Hollis Butts involved a tyrannosaurid skeleton sold to an eye surgeon and paleontology enthusiast in Hingham, Massachusetts, Dr. Henry Kriegstein. Kriegstein envisioned the skeleton in the living room of his house on Martha’s Vineyard, alongside a 7-foot-long Triceratops skull he and his daughter had found in Montana. When Kriegstein learned that the dinosaur might have come from the important feathered-dinosaur beds of Liaoning, China, which were being poached to death, he sent photos to the paleontologist Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago. Despite the fossil’s commercial origins Sereno agreed to study it on the condition that Kriegstein surrender the skeleton to science. He decided the skeleton represented a “punk size” progenitor of T. rex—suggesting that tyrannosaurs developed as far back as 125 million years ago, much earlier than the fossil record indicated. A team of researchers, including the Black Hills Institute’s Pete Larson, whom some paleontologists consider a tyrannosaur expert despite his lack of a doctoral degree, reanalyzed the fossil and disputed Sereno’s conclusions, arguing that the dinosaur was in fact a juvenile or subadult Tarbosaurus. Hollis Butts could’ve told them that: it was just how he had presented the fossil at Tucson. Paleontologists were furious that the specimen was taken seriously at all, considering its commercial history. Despite the debate on whether the skeleton represented a new species, Sereno named the specimen Raptorex kriegsteini, after Kriegstein’s parents, Roman and Cecilia Kriegstein, Holocaust survivors. “In the normal course of things this fossil could have ended up on someone’s mantelpiece or been forgotten in an attic somewhere, and lost to science,” Sereno said. Now “Dr. Kriegstein has found immortality for his family.”