11. “Are you kidding”: See “Author’s Note.” Dealers tended not to like it when reporters like me showed up, asking questions. “You might as well be the FBI,” one dealer told me one year at Tucson. Another said, “You know Tuvshin is dead.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you know how he died?” the dealer said.
“How’d he die?”
“Now see, that’s the question.”
“What’s your understanding?” I said.
“I don’t have an understanding; I just have a fear.”
“Of?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“You feel he was killed?”
The dealer just stared at me.
12. “In most cases”: See George F. Winters, “International Fossil Laws,” Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences website, aaps-journal.org.
13. “I thought it was okay”: Interviews with David Herskowitz.
14. Coleman Burke: The buyer of the T. bataar hoped to erect the skeleton in an historic building he had bought in 1983 at West Twenty-Sixth Street and Twelfth Avenue, along the Hudson River in New York City. This is West Chelsea, and the property, once home of the Central Stores Terminal Warehouse Company, held over a million square feet of space. Double railroad lines once ran directly from the river and through the riverside arch and out the other side, onto Eleventh Avenue. The largest of its kind in the city, the building held various goods in transit—carpets, furniture, furs, stage props, antiques. By the 1980s West Chelsea was desolate but coming back; in December 1986, a nightclub called Tunnel became a tenant. It occupied the cavernous ground-floor space that still hinted of trains. Tunnel would last, famously, until 2001, after hosting performances by artists like Prince and being burdened, infamously, by drugs and violence. There wasn’t anything quite like it in New York.
By the time the T. bataar went to auction, Burke’s real estate firm, Waterfront New York Realty Corp., operated on the seventh and top floor, and Burke kept a private crow’s nest of an office just above that, at the top of a spiral staircase. Homey and compact, the office seemed like less a work space than a living scrapbook of Burke’s many interests, including the piano (he played), antique maps, and the Explorers Club, where he was a member. Picture windows overlooked the Hudson—Burke could watch harbor cruisers, sailboats, and water taxis plow the river. On a small observation deck, he kept a large signal light and nautical flags, and enjoyed using them to communicate with passing ships. A cast Giganotosaurus carolinii skull occupied half the eastern wall.
One of Burke’s chief interests was Charles Darwin. When Burke was about fifty-five, he was walking the badlands of Argentina and came upon a moonscape of a boneyard. Argentina is among those countries that ban fossil collecting without a permit. Burke logged the location by GPS and told me he “went to tell the good guys.” He began funding expeditions. In thanks, the paleontologist Fernando Novas later named a late Cretaceous dinosaur after him, Orkoraptor burkei, one of the most southernmost carnivores ever found in South America. Burke funded fossil expeditions through Yale, and he once backed Nate Murphy, the Montana dinosaur hunter who went to prison. “People say, ‘How’s the archaeology going?’ and I say, ‘That’s not my bag.’ If it’s not a hundred million years old, I don’t do it,” he told me.
The architect Richard Meier was once interviewed at a party at Tunnel. As he studied “the dungeonlike expanse of brick, granite, and steel girders,” he told the New York Times: “It’s a great space—you can’t make it better than this.” But Burke thought of a way. In the spring of 2012, he heard about the Heritage auction and went to see the T. bataar at the preview, where he got so excited he camouflaged his interest by pretending to browse the other items. He had only twice bought anything at auction: an antique coffee grinder and, on Nantucket, a set of candlesticks on behalf of his wife, who was busy playing golf. The dinosaur was a lark, but a big one. Burke won the auction. But as the legal entanglements set in, he withdrew his offer.
15. Chait: For more information on Joseph Chait’s criminal case see the Department of Justice release from June 22, 2016, “Senior Auction Official at Beverly Hills Auction House Sentenced to Prison for Wildlife Trafficking.” Also see Brendan Pierson, “Auctioneer Gets Year in U.S. Prison for Ivory, Rhino Horn Smuggling,” Reuters, June 22, 2016.
16. “the Babe Ruth of forfeiture”: See Robert Lenzner, “The Babe Ruth of Forfeiture is After Your Ill-Gotten Gains,” Forbes, August 14, 2012.
17. Mickelson: See Bob Verdi, “Q&A with Phil Mickelson,” Golf Digest, April 23, 2009.
18. Hollis Butts: He emailed me a couple of times, asking for information (and not getting it) about “what Prokopi & Tuvshin and others were up to” during a certain period. “Most of the Mongolian fossils in the market would not otherwise have been collected however some possibly would have been collected and that loss needs to stop,” he told me. “The great majority of what was offered were duplications of already common fossils, protoceratops [sic] for example, and I was actually pleased that these specimens had been saved from the fate of all uncollected fossils, but occasionally I would see or hear about a specimen that should have been carefully excavated for study...Tuvshin assured us that export was permitted and that, additionally, nobody actually cared.” Butts claimed to have received emails from an American prepper, only to learn that the account was being used by a Homeland Security Investigations agent in disguise. Anyway, he had a lot of thoughts on the whole matter. At one point he noted how “distant these events revolving around Prokope [sic] are from the actual work done by the average full-time or part-time person in the fossil trade who will be negatively impacted by the politics of these events.” He also said there are two kinds of fossil buyers, “those who love fossils and those who want an interesting decoration, but mostly it was love.”
19. Documentary: Attenborough and the Sea Dragon. The one-hour documentary is available on BBC One though not, apparently, in the United States.
20. Mary Anning: The Mary Anning wing opened in July 2017, overlooking the beach that Mary once combed. For more information see the Lyme Regis Museum’s website, http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/about-us/mary-anning-wing/.
21. Case outcome: The dealer Tom Lindgren told me the case led to more self-monitoring in the trade. “If anything came out of this that’s good it’s that everyone is afraid to not do the homework that they should do. Everyone is policing everyone now. It’s going to be much more difficult in the future for people to do illegal business.” Lindgren said he sold a T. bataar skull with Guhr because at the time “you couldn’t find a published law. Even if you went on the internet you couldn’t find a lot. It was on the books in Mongolia, but in Mongolia you could go to customs to ship something, give them some money, and it’s gone, no problem. No one was policing it. What good is a law if it’s on the books for seventy years and no one’s enforcing it? How do people then know that the law really has teeth? Or that it even exists?” Mongolian law enforcement had, in fact, arrested a few people in fossil-trafficking cases, as the government relayed to U.S. authorities as the Prokopi cases developed, but that news was difficult to find.
22. “When I die”: See Jay Cridlin, “The Bone Collector,” St. Petersburg Times, March 21, 2003.
23. “buy the very same [voting] machines”: See Bumochir and Empson, “The Black Box of Presidential Politics.”
24. “too far away”: See Andrew Higgins, “In Mongolia, Lessons for Obama from Genghis Khan,” Washington Post, June 15, 2011.
25. “The president feels bad for him”: Interviews with Robert Painter.
26. “sort of holy pilgrimage”: mongoliandinosaurs.org.
27. “All the things”: Ibid.
28. “Hey, guys!”: I was there.
29. “Aren’t you anxious”: Ibid.
30. “Where’s the moon”: Ibid.
31. “That’s called a mold”: Ibid.
32. “We declared our love”: Interviews with Tyler Guynn.
33. “fate unknown”: See “Noka (YNT-22) ex Noka (YN-54) (1941),” navsource.org.
34. “The tiled floor”: Sales ad, archived on eBay.com.
35. “Why can’t you just be normal”: Interviews with Eric Prokopi.
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The Dinosaur Artist Page 51