9. Natural History Museum: Kirk Johnson, head of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, once told me the Ulaanbaatar museum’s decrepitude is painful but not surprising: “Mongolians have so many challenges with basic education, access to food, poverty—a museum is legitimately lower on the profile, because you want to take care of your people first. It’s hard to do best practices when you have no resources at all.”
10. “no substitute for aptitude”: On its website, the AMNH told prospective preppers, “Preparation is not one skill but many. It begins when the fossil is excavated from the ground, continues in the laboratory, and never really finishes, because the specimen will require care throughout its life in the collections. It can involve careful digging with small and large tools in the field; use of hand and power tools in the lab; carpentry and metalworking in the construction of mounts for storage and display; use of a microscope for preparation of very small fossils; and awareness of different materials and their characteristics in consolidation, adhesion, and molding and casting.” See http://preparation.paleo.amnh.org/60/training-to-become-a-preparator.
11. “bona fide” and “Really, what an armature is doing”: See Maureen Byko, “Steel and Science Bring Dinosaurs into the 21st Century at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History,” Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (June 2008). The preparator Phil Fraley said that when working a new project in an old museum like the AMNH or the Carnegie he always tried to use vintage materials that remained viable: “In some ways it was our way of recognizing and appreciating the work that all these men a hundred years ago had done.”
12. tugrik: The Mongolian currency may also be written as tugrug. Genghis Khan introduced gold and silver coins during his reign of the Mongol Empire and later was said to have introduced the world’s first bank notes; but by the mid-1920s, Mongolia had official money, first written as tögrög. The value was roughly equal to one Soviet ruble.
13. Ger: A ger may be covered with canvas, skins, felt, or a combination of all three. Felt, which is made by pressing wool, had many uses: clothes, blankets, rugs. During the reign of the Mongol Empire warriors sent felt puppets into battle on horses, “duping the enemy into believing that they had a much larger force than their actual number,” Morris Rossabi wrote in The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction. You can read about the brilliant history and craftsmanship of the Mongolian ger in many places, but a good starting point is the UNESCO website. The customs are fascinating. Outside one family’s Gobi ger, I committed taboo by stepping over one of the long wooden poles that herders use to lasso wild horses. This horrified two of the little girls who lived there. I don’t know what misfortune I brought upon myself but judging from their aghast expressions, it could not have been good.
14. The man of this ger: Interviews with Eric Prokopi.
15. “reptiles”: Interviews with Eric Prokopi.
16. “I mean how cute” and related: videos, photos, and papers of Eric and Amanda Prokopi.
17. Criminal “mastermind”: See John Romano, “Paleontologist May Lose Freedom for Living His Dream,” Tampa Bay Times, December 30, 2012. Doris told the paper, “This is crazy. He was doing what he loved....This was like arresting Indiana Jones.” Dr. Peter Harries, then of the University of South Florida’s geology department, told the paper, “It’s a delicate balance in paleontology. You need people out there looking for things because they may eventually be ruined by erosion. And there is a long history of amateurs being involved in the discovery of these bones. But once profit becomes the dominant motive it can change things. I don’t think Indiana Jones wanted to sell the Ark of the Covenant for $1 million.”
18. “It was more like Harold and Kumar”: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi.
19. “Big Gobi circuit”: According to the road map Prokopi followed, they went east from Ulaanbaatar, south at Bayandelger, down through Choyr, following the old rail line, and way down southeast beyond Erdene, very nearly to the Chinese border. Tuvshin told Eric he’d arranged with the military for special permission to be there. Then they drove west to Zuubayan, Manlay, Dalanzadgad, Gurvantes. Then northwest to Bugiin Tsav, cutting northeast to Bayanlig and Nariynteel and Arvayaheer, before going on up and over to Ulaanbaatar.
20. Gobi finds: Prokopi collected surface fossils in the desert. He lacked the time, materials, and jacketing experience—much less the fortified transportation—to take out large, heavy dinosaurs. It’s possible that diggers went back for any found skeletons and sent them out through Tuvshin, but who knows. The passages about the Gobi trip come from interviews with Eric Prokopi and Tony Perez, and their photos, plus the lengthy interview with Otgo.
CHAPTER 14: THE GHOST OF MARY ANNING
1. Details on early Lyme can be found in The Great Domesday Book, published in 1086, a copy of which is available at the U.K. National Archives in Kew, west of London. A good history of this foundational document can be found on the BBC’s website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/normans/doomsday_01.shtml.
2. This chapter is also informed by my visit to Lyme Regis, Charmouth, and London in May 2015. It was remarkable to walk the beaches where Mary Anning did her work and to see her spectacular fossil finds in the Natural History Museum. One drizzly Saturday afternoon in Lyme, some friends and I took a Mary Anning tour, led throughout the hilly town by a woman in a long frock and bonnet. We started in Cockmoile Square; across the way was the Lyme Fossil Shop, which sold fossil-hunting books and geologic hammers. We saw the Congregationalist church (aka the Dissenters’ chapel) that Mary attended before switching to the Church of England; it was now Dinosaurland Fossil Museum, a private company packed with curiosities. We passed cottages with names: “Weavers” had a turquoise door, “Lym House” had lavender. After passing Sherborne Lane, a street dating to Saxon times, we came to the site where Mary last lived and Anning Fossil Depot once stood, on the main street through town. Across the way was Ammonite Fine Foods, which had one of the few remaining thatched roofs in town.
3. “verrie daungerous”: John Fowles, A Short History of Lyme Regis.
4. “wool out, wine in”: Ibid. Merchandise came to include honey, oil, tar, figs, tallow, saffron, iron...
5. “the beauties of ‘wild’ nature”: This phrase can be found in many texts regarding Romanticism, including “The English Landscape Garden,” a chapter in Tom Turner’s Garden History Reference Encyclopedia (London: Gardenvisit.com, 2002).
6. Mary Anning’s biography: An excellent, if short, resource is Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, by Sir Crispin Tickell, a descendant of the Anning family. A former warden of Green College at Oxford, Tickell, regarded as a leading expert on climate change, served as president of the Royal Geographical Society, British representative to the United Nations, and the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Mexico. Also see the work of Hugh S. Torrens, emeritus professor of history of science and technology at Keele University, in Staffordshire, England, perhaps the greatest Mary Anning expert. See “Anning, Mary,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004) and “Presidential Address: Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme; ‘The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever knew,’” British Journal for the History of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Another excellent resource is The Fossil Hunter, by Shelley Emling. For your fictional reading pleasure, Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (New York: Dutton, 2010) is a deeply researched novel on the life of Mary Anning, informed by Chevalier’s immersive studies in Lyme Regis. Also, see Patricia Pierce, Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters (Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 2006).
7. Jane Austen: In her novel Persuasion, Austen wrote, “The young people were all wild to see Lyme.”
8. “beyond the value”: This often-repeated anecdote can be found in books including Emling’s The Fossil Hunter.
9. Rockfalls and mudflows: Author’s observation. In May 2015, when the spring fields of England were neon yellow with rape, several friend
s and I walked the beach at Lyme and at Black Ven, whose stratigraphy was striped in blacks, browns, and golds. Wildflowers had forced their way to the surface. The weather was rainy and chilly, but dozens of people were out fossil hunting, their geologic hammers clinking against rock. I saw one man hold a large stone high over his head and bring it down hard on a sharper, bigger rock, trying (and failing) to break it. The waves were relentless; the black shale cliff wore fog. It’s a stony and forbidding beach, littered with broad, thick seaweed clumped together like tangled film; you wouldn’t necessarily want to sunbathe there. But it’s bleakness is gorgeous. The fossil walk put on by the Lyme Regis Museum is excellent, too. It starts at Gun Cliff and is led by geologists, paleontologists, and/or veteran fossil hunters. Our tour day was sunny and blue—“no good,” said Chris Andrew, one of the guides. “The dreadful sunshine,” said another guide, Paddy Howe, who had been hunting fossils there for the past forty-four years and whose workshop was in the basement of Alice’s Bear Shop, a teddy bear and doll hospital. The best time to hunt is after storms, when the finds were like “fossils on a conveyor belt.”
10. “found almost all the fine things”: See, among many other sources, Dennis R. Dean, Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs. Whenever Mary found an ichthyosaur skeleton, she noticed odd conical stones near the abdominal area. Cracking them open with her rock hammer yielded bones and scales. Mary reasoned that these “bezoar stones” must be fossil feces. Her friend William Buckland eventually agreed with her, formally naming the fossils coprolites and publicly recognizing Mary’s discovery. Buckland made a table out of coprolites, which today can be seen in the Lyme Regis Museum.
11. Georges Cuvier: Combining scientific urgency and literary beauty, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction is the finest of all the encapsulations of the work of Georges Cuvier and his contemporaries, including Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. In 1851, Cuvier wrote, “Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.”
12. “persevering female”: Also widely quoted, from the Bristol Mirror. See Prothero, The Story of Life in Twenty-Five Fossils.
13. “The extraordinary thing”: This is another widely quoted tidbit about Mary. For this and more information see “Mary Anning (1799–1847),” on the website of the Geological Society of London, https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Library-and -Information-Services/Exhibitions/Women-and-Geology/Mary-Anning.
14. “men of learning”: Emling, The Fossil Hunter. Pinney also wrote that Mary “glories in being afraid of no one, and in saying anything she pleases.”
15. “Her history shows”: See Charles Dickens, “Mary Anning, the Fossil Finder,” All the Year Round, February 11, 1865.
16. Duria Antiquior: You can see Duria Antiquior at http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-photos/ duria-antiquior-%E2%80%93-more-ancient-dorset-1830. The website notes that an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur “would have likely never battled” but that the Henry De La Beche lithograph “inspired author Jules Verne to pen a similar scene in his book Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
17. “reduced to straitened circumstances”: This was published in the Dorset County Chronicle in 1836, where Lyme Regis Museum staffer and researcher Jo Draper found it and wrote about it in June 2010. See Jo Draper, “Mary Anning and Me,” Dorset Life Magazine, June 2010. Draper wrote that one of the great Mary Anning puzzles was “how someone as sensible as she ended up completely broke towards the end of her life.”
18. “many contributions”: Various people wrote that Mary Anning made “many contributions” to science, among them Hugh Torrens, who authored the entry on Anning in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
19. “I am well known”: As quoted in G. Y. Craig and E. J. Jones, A Geological Miscellany (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 2016). For an audio slideshow of Mary Anning’s discoveries showing Anning’s sketches of her finds, see “Jurassic Woman,” narrated by Tracy Chevalier, BBC News, October 21, 2010, www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11590505.
20. FOSSIL WARDEN: Met one at Black Ven. His name was Stuart Godman, and he said his job was primarily to protect people, not fossils. He said he found a fossil every thirty or so stones and that “the really good stuff is hard to find.”
21. “delightful shop”: Some of the biographical information on Chris Moore comes from the various news accounts published or aired about him in the Lyme Regis area and elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In September 2009, Shoreline, a local newsletter, ran a package headlined “Paleontology in Charmouth” to mark the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. A delightful package. The editor signed her note to readers, “Here’s to mists and mellow fruitfulness,” from the John Keats poem “To Autumn.”
22. “I always wanted”: Shoreline, “Paleontology in Charmouth.”
23. Befferlands Farms list: The Befferlands and local descriptions are from my visit to Charmouth and the coin-toss list is from a photo courtesy of Eric Prokopi.
24. “A home is more”: Interviews with Amanda Prokopi. See also Allison Clark, “A Second Chance for Serenola,” Gainesville Sun, January 24, 2010.
25. “manufacturer”: Entry number UPS-3162168-6, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, “Entry/Immediate Delivery” form. The importation and shipping documents can be found in U.S. District Court case files 12-CIV-4760 and 12-CR-00981, Southern District of New York.
26. “playing both sides” and other details on the conversations between Hollis Butts and Eric Prokopi: Interviews with Prokopi and Butts, backed up by emails obtained by the author.
27. Fossil cases: See Lynn Hollinger, “Two Amazing Seizures: CBP, ICE Seize 100 Million Year Old Fossils, Pre-historic Cultural Artifacts Repatriated to China,” Frontline, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Winter 2010.
28. “Do you have more photos?”: Papers of Eric Prokopi.
CHAPTER 15: THE LAST DINOSAUR
1. “I feel very sorry” and related: Papers of Eric Prokopi.
2. Details about the Eric Prokopi/Chris Moore visit to Mongolia are from interviews with Prokopi, the paleontologist Chultem “Otgo” Otgonjargal, and photographs provided by Prokopi.
3. Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, containing the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act (PRPA): The Act passed the Senate on January 15, 2009, and was signed into law on March 30, as Public Law 111-11, Title VI, Subtitle D; 16 U.S.C. §§ 470aaa-470aaa-11. (See congress.gov.) This followed a May 2000 report, for the secretary of the interior, “Fossils on Federal & Indian Lands,” which can be found at blm.gov. See also “Obama Signs the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009,” New York Times; March 30, 2009. For more information, see the National Park Service’s guidelines at nps.gov. Before the 2003 hearing on the PRPA the public had a chance to give opinions on the legislation. A summary of their comments can be found in “Fossils on Federal & Indian Lands.” See also “Federal Register Notice 64 FR 27803-27804, May 21, 1999, and Public Meeting, June 21, 1999.”
4. “scientific principles and expertise”: The full text of Bennitt’s open letter to Congress, dated January 15, 2009, can be found on the AAPS website, aaps.net.
5. “dangit”: Interviews with Tyler Guynn.
6. “Here is our Tyrannosaurus”: Everything Earth Facebook page.
7. “up to and including skulls”: Interviews with Michael Triebold, president of Triebold Paleontology Inc., which is in Woodland Park, Colorado. I first interviewed him at the Denver show in 2012.
8. “a big, whole T. rex-y skeleton”: Ibid.
9. “Luxury Market”: See “Luxury Market for Dinosaur Remains Thrives,” Huffington Post, November 10, 2011, updated on January 9, 2012.
10. The details of prepping and mounting the T. bataar come partly from interviews with Eric Prokopi and with paleontologists and other preppers.
11. “Tarbofootpathological
”: Papers of Eric Prokopi.
12. Basketball: This detail comes from Peter Larson’s memoir, Rex Appeal.
13. “Buyer X”: See case file CV07-00695, Mineralienzentrum/Andreas Guhr v. GeoDecor Inc./Thomas Lindgren, et al., U.S. District Court, Central District of California. The suit was settled in June 2007. According to court documents, Isadore Chait, for I.M. Chait, was the broker.
14. “fighting pair”: Heritage Auctions still keeps information about this sale on its website, ha.com. See also Marice Richter, “Dinosaur Auction Features Fighting Pair of Skeletons,” Reuters, June 12, 2011; and “Skeletons of fighting dinosaurs sell for $2.5m,” Telegraph, June 13, 2011. For a profile of Heritage, see Steve Pate, “Rich Heritage,” D magazine, November 2011. The magazine noted, “For years the top currency and coin house in the United States, Heritage has sold a number of coins for more than $1 million apiece—the most recent ($1.3 million) at an August coin auction in Chicago that brought in a total of $31.5 million. Last year, the company also became No. 1 in the world in sports memorabilia, with almost $13 million in sales. It does $30 million a year in comics and comic art alone. The house has sold $25 million in illustration and fine art just this year.” CEO Steve Ivy said, “My partners and I all came up as collectors. We’re all seat-of-the-pants entrepreneurs.”
15. “impeccably preserved”: See Wynne Parry, “Rare Tyrannosaurus Skeleton to Be Auctioned,” Live Science, May 14, 2012.
16. “After discussing”: Papers of Eric Prokopi.
17. You can see details about the “Fighting Dinosaurs: New Discoveries from Mongolia” exhibit at amnh.org. Also see John Noble Wilford, “Presenting a Fight to the Death from 80,000,000 B.C.,” New York Times, May 19, 2000. The spectacular fossil has been repeatedly referenced. For instance, see R. Barsbold, “‘The Fighting Dinosaurs’: The Position of Their Bodies before and after Death,” Paleontological Journal 50 (December 2016); Barsbold writes that the dinosaurs “resemble two small children playing on sand.”
The Dinosaur Artist Page 45