The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  CHAPTER 9: HOLLYWOOD HEADHUNTERS

  1. Paynes Prairie is a glorious place. In 1774, the naturalist William Bartram described the Alachua savannah as a “level green plain...fifty miles in circumference, and scarcely a tree or bush of any kind to be seen on it,” but today it is lush and full of life. The Prokopis enjoyed going there as a family. I went to Paynes Prairie with them in the summer of 2012. We walked the long boardwalk, out into the marsh. I hoped to see an alligator. Amanda said that if we got chased we should run “in a zigzag pattern” because “gators can’t cut.” The Prokopis pointed out a semidistant lump in the unmoving water, just beyond a stand of reeds. We waited for the creature to show itself, and when it didn’t, Eric walked off the marked path and down to the water’s edge. He began pulling up reeds and throwing them at the lump like spears. This made me various kinds of uneasy. First, I did not want him to be chased and eaten in front of his family; also, it seemed unwise to be uprooting the reeds in hopes of uprooting the wildlife. Later, I looked up the park rules, which read, “All plants, animals, and park property are protected. The collection, destruction, or disturbance of plants, animals, or park property is prohibited.” The lump in the water submerged with barely a ripple, then resurfaced, just as quietly, in basically the same spot. We moved on. For more information on Paynes Prairie see Elizabeth A. Bohls and Ian Duncan, Travel Writing 1700–1830: An Anthology, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006); and floridastateparks.org.

  2. “Yeah, we have to live here”: Interviews with Amanda and Eric Prokopi.

  3. Serenola renovation: You can see a slideshow tour of the property on YouTube, via Coldwell Banker M.M. Parrish Realtors, posted on December 12, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCOzwOq5ij4.

  4. David Herskowitz wasn’t sure what to think of Eric Prokopi, and vice versa. “I don’t like people that I don’t know, and it was hard to know Eric because he was so quiet and to himself,” Herskowitz told me. He said he decided to work with Prokopi only after a trusted dealer described him as “very moral, honest.” Herskowitz didn’t like it that Prokopi once raised his fee at a point of delivery but otherwise said, “He was never shady in the fossil business.” This comes from interviews with Herskowitz in January 2016, in Tucson.

  5. I.M. Chait: At his gallery, Izzy Chait kept a piano. In the 1990s, after having set aside jazz and blues for twenty-five years, he decided to pursue a “musical legacy.” He formed an Izzy Chait Quartet and started singing again in public, covering George Gershwin medleys and legends like Sinatra. He recorded eight albums. His wife, Mary Ann, who had been his high school sweetheart, played bass.

  6. “So I did gun shows, swap meets, the Rose Bowl”: David Rosenfeld, “Izzy Chait: A Life of Extraordinary Things,” Westside People, May 15, 2014.

  7. “As a committed supporter of Asian art”: See “A Personal Message from I.M. Chait,” chait.com.

  8. “Americans went crazy”: Rosenfeld, “Izzy Chait.”

  9. “Egyptian mummy’s hand; lion, hyena”: See Roja Heydarpour, “And to the Winners Go the Dinosaur Skull and the Mummified Hand,” New York Times, March 26, 2007.

  10. “perfect for a New York City apartment”: Ibid.

  11. Skull buyer: For coverage of the Cage-DiCaprio bidding war see Julie Miller, “Nicolas Cage Outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for a Dinosaur Skull That May Have Been Stolen,” vanityfair.com, October 29, 2013; Ben Mirin, “Nicolas Cage’s Dinosaur Skull May Be Hot Property but He Shouldn’t Have Bought It in the First Place,” Slate, October 29, 2013; and David A. Keeps, “A Cooling-Off,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2008. Cage’s collecting habits have been widely covered. A favorite category: comic books. See Andy Lewis, “Nicolas Cage’s Superman Comic Nets Record $2.1 Million at Auction,” Hollywood Reporter, November 30, 2011.

  12. “stunning views and extreme privacy”: This according to Los Angeles real estate agent Wilson Chueire, chueiregroup.com. Property records and media reports showed that DiCaprio bought the home in 1999.

  13. DiCaprio environmental causes: In 1998, DiCaprio set up the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation to protect endangered wildlife from extinction. In 2017, the foundation announced plans to give $20 million in grants to some hundred environmental causes. See Rebecca Rubin, “Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation Awards $20 Million in Environmental Grants,” Variety, September 19, 2017. The Los Angeles Times has published numerous articles related to DiCaprio and his environmental causes, as has the New York Times. Also see Suzanne Goldenberg, “How Leonardo DiCaprio Became One of the World’s Top Climate Change Champions,” The Guardian, February 29, 2016; and Stephen Rodrick, “Inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s Crusade to Save the World,” Rolling Stone, February 28, 2016. DiCaprio once told Wired, “I’ve been interested in science and biodiversity ever since I was very young, probably from watching films about the rain forest at the Natural History Museum.” See Robert Capps, “The Nine Lives of Leo DiCaprio,” Wired, January 2016. In 2015, artnet.com wrote that DiCaprio kept an “important collection of fossils in his home, consisting mainly of predatory dinosaurs.” See Daria Daniel, “Take a Look Inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s Growing Art Collection,” artnet.com, March 11, 2015.

  14. “up from none five years ago”: See Kelly Crow, “The Oldest Crop,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2007.

  15. He got word from Butts: In an October 2012 email, just after Eric Prokopi’s arrest, Butts told me, “In fairness, I should point out that we do not like each other but we do business and are civil. And he does have a wife and kid to support so I wish the government would instead go and arrest some bankers, universally detested at the moment.”

  CHAPTER 10: THE WARRIOR AND THE EXPLORER

  1. “There was no reason”: Among the excellent scholarly resources on Mongolian history and culture see David Morgan, The Mongols; and Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. The Columbia University scholar Morris Rossabi has published numerous invaluable books on Mongolia, including The Mongols and Global History and The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction, altogether the product of over forty years of scholarship. See a short video of Rossabi talking about Mongolia’s global, historical significance here: https://vimeo.com/65237984. Jonathan Addleton’s Mongolia and the United States: A Diplomatic History provides crucial historical context.

  2. Mongol Empire ruled: The Mongol Empire invaded northern China and, in the 1260s, Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, became emperor. He focused on agriculture, new technology, and aid to orphans, widows, and the elderly, Rossabi wrote in The Mongols. He protected artisans, built a shrine to Confucius, and elevated the status of merchants and science (especially prizing astronomy), and encouraged “unprecedented contact” between East and West. He established good relations with Korea—which continue today, even with North Korea—by sending one of his daughters to marry the king. Kublai built relationships with Muslims because he needed their “invaluable skills as tax collectors and financial administrators.” In China, the Ming dynasty replaced Mongolian rule in 1368, remaining in power until the early 1640s.

  3. “empire was so huge”: Morgan, The Mongols. In his book The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction, Morris Rossabi wrote, “What actually provoked the Mongols to initiate what turned out to be the greatest conquests in world history? One explanation is the precariousness of their economy. Droughts, cold winters, or diseases among their animals threatened their survival. Under these circumstances, they either had to trade or raid for essential goods.”

  4. The empire eventually fractured: The Mongol empire became too vast—and the communications and transportation networks were too rudimentary—to govern from a central administration. The khanates struggled for power, some arguing that Mongolia should remain pastoral and others arguing for sedentary settlements that allowed for commerce and craft. See Rossabi, The Mongols.

  5. Waited for its chance: This is necessary reductionism. The Mongolia-Russia-China story is a fascinatingly long and complex one. See the Bibliography for books on the subjec
t.

  6. “adventurers, missionaries, or merchants”: Jonathan Addleton, Mongolia and the United States.

  7. “the rolling prairies of Kansas and Nebraska”: Addleton, Mongolia and the United States. In his book The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction, Morris Rossabi wrote that Mongolians’ devotion to their horses and their aversion to washing—water being scarce—“were perceived as evidence of their barbarism.”

  8. A crucial step toward survival: Christopher Kaplonski, Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia: Memory of Heroes.

  9. “the world’s most perilous”: Rossabi, The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction.

  10. “friendly cooperation”: Addleton, Mongolia and the United States.

  11. “I don’t think this country can be compared”: See Fred C. Shapiro, “Starting from Scratch,” The New Yorker, January 20, 1992.

  12. The Secret History of the Mongols: The text, written in the original Mongolian, is widely considered the most important book ever published in Mongolia and the country’s oldest surviving literary work. In one English translation, Igor De Rachewiltz noted that “no other nomadic or semi-nomadic people has ever created a literary masterpiece like it, in which epic poetry and narrative are so skillfully and indeed artistically blended with fictional and historical accounts.” See Igor de Rachewiltz, “The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century,” December 2015; shorter version edited by John C. Street, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Books and Monographs. Book 4. h9p://cedar.wwu.edu/cedarbooks/4. Gereltuv Dashdoorov, a translator of Roy Chapman Andrews books and an executive and guide at Mongolia Quest, a tourism company in Ulaanbaatar, once told me, “It’s our bible.”

  13. “semi-mythical”: Rossabi, The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction.

  14. “one of the great literary monuments”: The Secret History of the Mongols, for the First Time Done into English out of the Original Tongue and Provided with an Exegetical Commentary, by Francis Woodman Cleaves, Harvard University Press, 1982. Cleaves was the first to fully translate The Secret History into English, and did so in collaboration with Fr. Antoine Mostaert. The text was published in 1982 by Harvard University Press, decades after the translation work occurred.

  15. democratic hero or genocidal terror: In The Mongols, Rossabi writes, “His attacks resulted in the indiscriminate and brutal killing of at least tens of thousands of people and in the maiming of hundreds of thousands, and the recent depiction of him as a great heroic figure and as a believer in democracy and in international law clashes with historical reality.” He added that the Golden Horde, as the Mongol army was known, “introduced a level of violence that had scarcely been seen.” During his political career, President Tsakhia Elbegdorj would continually cite Genghis’s reputation as a “rule of law” leader even though that legacy is somewhat unclear.

  16. poisoned by Tatars: this according to a number of historical accounts, including Rossabi’s The Mongols.

  17. “fantastic monsters”: Kaplonski, Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia.

  18. death of Genghis: Rossabi wrote that the leader’s death and burial, in August 1227, became both mystery and legend. Maybe he died of an arrow wound, maybe of injuries suffered during a hunt. Rossabi wrote, “A more bizarre account states that the captured wife of an enemy leader hid a knife in her vagina and stabbed Chinggis to death during sexual intercourse.” See Rossabi’s The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction.

  19. Russian Revolution: At least one Westerner saw an opening in Mongolia around this time. An American attaché to the State Department urged Washington to install a U.S. consulate there, saying Mongolia held valuable commercial opportunities. This was “the psychological moment for the inauguration of American activity in Mongolia,” the attaché urged. Washington again declined. See Addleton, Mongolia and the United States.

  20. Sükhbaatar: Mongolian names often have varying spellings. The spellings in this book are consistent with those found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

  21. “flamboyantly crazy”: See the foreword that AMNH paleontologist Michael Novacek wrote for Charles Gallenkamp’s Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions.

  22. “all the adjuncts that contribute to happiness”: This quote appears, unattributed, in The WPA Guide to Wisconsin, originally published as part of the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project series, which began in 1937. Trinity University Press reprint, October 2013.

  23. “He told me it was men of desperate fortunes”: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: William Taylor, 1719).

  24. “bible”: Roy Chapman Andrews, Under a Lucky Star: A Lifetime of Adventure.

  25. “minerals, fossils, stuffed animals”: Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter.

  26. “I was born to be an explorer”: Roy Chapman Andrews, This Business of Exploring.

  27. Beloit College: In Under a Lucky Star, Andrews wrote that his alma mater was considered “the Yale of the West.”

  28. “repurposed pipes and plumbing fixtures”: “A Dinosaur by Any Other Name,” American Museum of Natural History website, August 13, 2012, amnh.org.

  29. “It didn’t feed on flesh”: “Big Thunder Saurian Viewed and Approved,” New York Times, February 17, 1905.

  30. AMNH visitors: Some five million people visit the American Museum of Natural History annually. See the AMNH Annual Report, 2016, available at AMNH.org.

  31. “The magic city”: Andrews, Under a Lucky Star.

  32. “baronial splendor”: Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and John Massengale, New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890–1915 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 1983).

  33. “birds, mammals, reptiles”: Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter.

  34. “penetrating some of the earth’s remotest areas”: Ibid.

  35. “in which men worked who to me were as gods”: “Unusual Men in the Public Eye,” Popular Science Monthly, July 1929. At first, the AMNH was housed in the Arsenal Building on Central Park South. The building at Seventy-Seventh Street and Central Park West opened on December 22, 1877. One can imagine Andrews roaming the museum, marveling at the creatures that gazed back at him across time. The romance of discovery held such a grip on the public imagination that the Explorers Club had recently been founded, in Manhattan, to “preserve the instinct to explore.”

  36. Charles H. Sternberg: In the 1800s, Sternberg dropped out of college in order to hunt full time for Philadelphia’s Edward Drinker Cope, the self-taught hunter and prolific, scholarly author whose mad rivalry with the Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh led to the epic “bone wars” of the late 1800s. Sternberg and his family collected some of the finest skeletons ever unearthed in the U.S. and Alberta, Canada, many of which can be seen in the world’s top museums. “The object of my life has been to advance human knowledge, and that could not be accomplished if I kept my best specimens to gratify myself,” Sternberg wrote in his 1909 memoir, The Life of a Fossil Hunter. “They had to go, and they went, often for less than they cost me in labor and expense, into the hands of those who could give authoritative knowledge of them to the world and preserve them in great museums for the benefit of all.” Sternberg also wrote, “I demand that my name appear as collector on all the material which I have gathered from the rocks of the earth,” a sentiment some modern hunters knew well.

  37. “But one had to take him in context”: Edwin H. Colbert, A Fossil-Hunter’s Notebook: My Life with Dinosaurs and Other Friends (New York: Dutton, 1980).

  38. “pseudo-scientific work of white supremacism”: See Jedediah Purdy, “Environmentalism’s Racist History,” newyorker.com, August 13, 2015.

  39. “the evolutionary ‘staging ground’”: Douglas Preston, Dinosaurs in the Attic.

  40. “solve the geographical”: See “Young Americans Seek to Erase ‘Black Spots’ off Map,” New York Times, June 1, 1912.

  41. “the unknown section of North Korea”: Ibid.

  42
. “the most vivid example”: Ibid.

  43. “Andrews’s career was a straight line from Beloit”: Barry Gewen, “Protoceratops Lays an Egg,” New York Times, June 3, 2001.

  44. Yvette Borup Andrews: The American Museum of Natural History had recently hired her brother, George, as a curator of geology. But while George had survived the “severe test” of polar exploration, he soon drowned, with a friend, in a Connecticut canoeing accident. See “Death of George Borup, Revised Plans of the Crocker Land Expedition,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 44, 6 (1912). “It was his ambition to devote his life to science and scientific exploration,” the bulletin reported.