Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  Not until 1975 did anyone step forward to challenge the Marsh skull. Finally, two paleontologists (one at Carnegie) published a paper maintaining that the Marsh skull was entirely incorrect, and should be replaced by the Douglass skull. The evidence they presented was overwhelmingly persuasive. In 1979 the Carnegie Museum decapitated their Brontosaurus and crowned it with the much more graceful Douglass skull. Other museums followed suit. The American Museum has intended to replace its wrong skull and obtained a copy from the Carnegie Museum. Unfortunately, an examination of the Museum's Brontosaurus mount revealed that any head-switching would be risky unless the entire skeleton was restored. So—for the time being, at least—the old skull is still in place, topping the great Brontosaurus in the Museum's Hall of Early Dinosaurs.

  Getting back to Barnum Brown: Brown continued to scour the West, working quarries and prospecting. While Jurassic dinosaurs were being pulled out of Bone Cabin Quarry, Brown struck fossil gold in another location—Hell Creek, Montana. These were Upper Cretaceous beds, dating from the apex of the Age of the Dinosaurs, and in 1902 Brown organized a Museum expedition to the Hell Creek formation. His nose proved unerring. Buried in the sandstone matrix he discovered the skeleton of a huge carnivorous dinosaur, previously unknown to science. The sandstone was exceptionally hard, and the fossil had to be dynamited out of its tomb. Tons of sandstone blocks containing the rare fossil were hauled from the site by horse-drawn wagon 130 miles to the nearest railroad. When finally assembled, this grim meat-eater was christened Tyrannosaurus rex, "King of the Tyrant Lizards."

  Five years later at Hell Creek, Brown found another Tyrannosaurus in superb condition. The Museum kept both tyrannosaurs, which were the only two reasonably complete skeletons of this dinosaur that had ever been found, and were considered a national treasure. During World War II, when it was feared that the Germans might bomb New York, the Museum donated the first Tyrannosaurus to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, where it remains to this day.

  By the end of 1908, Brown had more or less cleaned out the Hell Creek beds, and he started casting about for a third locale. Again, his luck held out. One day a talkative visitor from Canada showed up in his office. The man owned a large ranch along the Red Deer River in Alberta, and he mentioned that he had picked up bones along the banks of the Red Deer just like the bones on display in the Museum. Although Brown was somewhat skeptical, he nevertheless paid a visit to the ranch in 1909. One visit was all Brown needed. The rancher had collected a mass of bones, and most were saurian.

  Brown immediately organized an expedition, which arrived at the valley of the Red Deer River in the early summer of 1910. Getting to the fossils—and getting them out—proved a difficult problem. The fossils were eroding out of the steep canyons along the river, and were thus inaccessible from the top. The only option available, Brown decided, was to float down the river on a barge big enough to carry his crew and all the fossils they would collect. They constructed a twelve-by-thirty-foot flatboat topped with a large canvas tent. The barge included such amenities as a cook stove (with chimney), and a rowboat for shore landings. The entire thing was controlled with two large oarlike "sweeps," used for steering the boat through rapid water.

  The party started downriver from Red Deer, scanning the canyon walls for signs of fossils. At first they found only scattered mammalian remains, but at a bend in the river near Content, Alberta, the walls began yielding dinosaurs in increasing numbers. As they lazily floated along, Brown would scan the canyon walls with his binoculars, and the crew would then land at promising sites. The dinosaurs kept rolling in. "Box after box," Brown wrote, "was added to the collection till scarcely a cubit's space remained unoccupied on board our fossil ark."

  After the Canadian expedition, the next two decades were quiet ones for Brown. He diversified his collecting activities and traveled the world, finding everything from mummified musk-ox to fossil turtles. Then came the 1930s, and with them the discovery for which Brown is perhaps best remembered—the gigantic dinosaur graveyard at Howe Ranch. In 1931, Brown had led prospecting parties to the Lower Cretaceous beds of Montana, following the fossil-bearing rock southward to Greybull, Wyoming. Here he ran into a Mrs. Austin, herself a fossil enthusiast, who told him about some large bones she had seen on the Howe Ranch, at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. Two years later, Brown and several companions reconnoitered the ranch, and were guided to the big bones by a crusty eighty-two-year-old rancher named Barker. They were hard to miss; the bones were weathering out of a horizontal strata of rock adjacent to the ranch buildings. During the next week, Barker looked on while Brown painstakingly chipped away at the bones with his crooked awl to get a sense of what was there. A week of this was almost too much for Barker. Disgusted by the slowness of the work, he had to be physically restrained from hacking out the bones with a pickaxe. Brown realized that at least two large sauropod skeletons were embedded in the rock, but his limited team and financial resources made excavation impossible.

  Large sums of money would be needed to recover the skeletons, and Brown turned to an old supporter, the Sinclair Oil Company, whose logo is, of course, a dinosaur. Readers may remember the dinosaur booklets and stickers that the Sinclair Oil Company gave out to motorists during the I930S and I940s. Brown wrote the booklets, while Sinclair bankrolled many of his expeditions.

  In 1934, a much bigger expedition led by Brown returned to the Howe Ranch, and on June I they began uncovering the quarry to bedrock. Brown wrote:

  It soon became apparent that ... there was a veritable herd of dinosaurs, their skeletal remains crossed, crisscrossed, and interlocked in a confused and almost inextricable manner.... Through the warping of the strata incident to the nearby mountain uplift, the bones had been checked and fractured to a high degree. so all had to be thoroughly shellacked as soon as uncovered. Never have I seen such a thirsty lot of dinosaurs.

  After the length and breadth of the bone deposit was determined, the area was gridded into three-foot squares. The bones were in such a tangle that all had to be drawn in situ first, and the relationships of the body sections mapped out before anything could be removed. To accomplish this, a man was hoisted in an old barrel about thirty feet above the quarry, from which photographs could be taken straight down on the tangle of bones.

  Fortunately the bones were embedded in soft clay, and work progressed quickly. Finally, on November 17, the last crate of fossils was loaded into a boxcar bound for New York City. Packed into the car were 4,000 bones in 144 cases weighing 35 tons. At least twenty, and probably more, dinosaurs were represented by individual bones and entire skeletons. Most of the dinosaurs were the swamp-dwelling kind—the large-bodied, long-necked sauropods.

  The Howe Quarry presented a mystery. Never had such a concentration of dinosaur bones been discovered before. The bones were not water-worn or abraded, as would be expected if the Howe Quarry had been an eddy in an ancient stream bed.*15 Nor had the bones been separated or scattered by scavengers. The bones were extensively interlocked, indicating that a single event may have killed them all at approximately the same time.

  Even the distribution of bones was odd. Around the edges of the quarry were scattered single bones from smaller species; but in the center, a dozen limbs of large species were found standing upright on articulated feet. Surrounding the bones was a very fine silt of the kind deposited only in standing, muddy water.

  Brown studied the quarry and drew his own conclusion, which is more notable for the image it conjured up than for its accuracy. The following passage, published in Natural History in 1935, did much to shape our conception of the last days of the dinosaurs:

  The climate was tropical, and we see a flat land rich in vegetation, dotted by countless shallow lakes and marshes. Cycads, palms, and palmettos cover the lowlands, with pines on the uplands. Countless ferns, thick grass, and rushes form a rank vegetation over the marshy, hummocked shores. . . . [The dinosaurs] congregate by thousands, huddling close together as reptiles do, and
filling every lagoon as far as the eye can see.

  Now Mother Earth changes the stage setting. The impulse that finally was expressed by the nearby mountains elevated these lowlands. The large lakes were drained and the swamps vanished. The dinosaurs became more and more concentrated in the remaining pools as they were pushed together in huge herds. . . .

  As the water receded, the smaller, weaker dinosaurs were trampled and their bones scattered on the borders of the pool; the larger ones huddled closer and closer together as they made their last futile stand against fate.

  Brown's description is somewhat off the mark. The quarry probably represents the remains of a herd of dinosaurs that perished in a drying lake. However, it was a local phenomenon, not a worldwide extinction, since these were Jurassic dinosaurs, which lived relatively early in the Age of Dinosaurs. The event that caused the drying of the lake was probably nothing more than a severe drought, not the uplifting of the land, which usually takes millions of years.

  Brown retired from the Museum in 1942, but continued to work until the week before his death in 1963. In his later years, as he conducted visitors through the fossil halls of the Museum, he would murmur, "Here's another one of my children." While he was planning a trip to the Isle of Wight to dig dinosaurs out of its 80o-foot cliffs (and while the Museum was planning his ninetieth birthday bash), Barnum Brown died.

  His "children" can still be seen—the ponderous Brontosaurus, the Tyrannosaurus, and dozens of others, their huge, shellacked skeletons a memorial to the greatest dinosaur collector of them all.

  STERNBERG AND THE DINOSAUR MUMMY

  In addition to the dinosaur-collecting efforts of Barnum Brown and others on the Museum staff, Osborn also enlisted the services of various free-lance fossil collectors. A rare breed of man was the free-lance collector. Often wealthy (but not always, as we shall see), the free-lancer hunted dinosaurs for sheer pleasure, with a passion similar to that of prospectors for gold or uranium. Some of the rich collectors kept their collections themselves and donated specimens to various museums; others were hired by museums to collect a particular species missing from their vaults.

  Charles Hazelius Sternberg and his sons were a family of such free-lancers, collecting on a fee basis for museums all over the world. Osborn was hungry for spectacular fossils, and the Museum had the money to buy them. He followed Sternberg's progress closely, ready to pounce when anything spectacular came to light. He was certainly not disappointed. One of the rarest fossils of all time—and certainly one of the strangest dinosaur specimens on display—was discovered by Sternberg and acquired by Osborn just before it was to be sold to the British Museum.

  It is worth taking a close look at Sternberg. Science requires the activities of two very different kinds of people—the brilliant thinkers and synthesizers, and the hardworking but unimaginative compilers of data. A great deal has been written about the former but virtually nothing about the latter. Sternberg was a member of this group, and is today almost forgotten despite his significant contribution to vertebrate paleontology. He never served on the staff of an institution and never claimed to be more than a fossil collector, although he did publish descriptive papers on his finds. His scientific ideas tended toward the bizarre. Often, greedier and more ambitious scientists would publish Sternberg's discoveries without giving him proper credit. Sternberg was an eccentric in the classic tradition of professional fossil collectors. He was a wizened man with a game leg, a stone-deaf ear, and a propensity to quote the Bible.

  The son of a Lutheran minister, Sternberg was born in upstate New York in 1850 but grew up on a small farm outside of Ellsworth, Kansas, which was still very much a frontier town. He learned early how to shoot buffalo and fight Indians, and in his autobiography he describes how the "dead cart" would pass through the town most mornings to pick up those who had been killed in saloons the night before. Sternberg himself was once shot in the head during a robbery, but it wasn't a serious wound.

  It was in this environment that Sternberg somehow stumbled across a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, which "thrilled" him and explained for the first time the fossil shells he had collected as a little boy. Sternberg and his brother had gathered a large collection of fossil leaves from sandstone outcroppings, and Sternberg vowed to devote his life to "collecting facts from the Crust of the Earth"—a plan vigorously opposed by his father, who felt that there was no money in a life of fossil hunting. But Sternberg approached his chosen profession in a businesslike manner. He financed his collecting by selling his fossils to museums in America, Germany, England, and France.

  Over his father's objections, he enrolled in the Kansas State Agricultural College, where he studied paleontology. After graduating, he wrote a letter to Edward Drinker Cope and audaciously asked for three hundred dollars to outfit an expedition to the chalk beds of western Kansas. The wealthy Cope, hoping that Sternberg might be able to add to his growing fossil collection, sent the money, and Sternberg was off.

  Later in the season Cope himself joined Sternberg's party, and they moved the expedition to Montana to look for Cretaceous dinosaurs. The area was barren and lacking decent water, and the nights were freezing. Cope had physically pushed himself almost too far, and was so weak at times that he "reeled from side to side as he walked." Sternberg described in his memoirs how the excitement and danger of their work "seemed to make us reckless of life." At night Cope suffered from hideous nightmares that kept the camp awake. "When we went to bed," Sternberg recalled, "the Professor would soon have a severe attack of nightmare. Every animal of which we had found traces during the day played with him at night, tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling upon him.

  "When I waked him, he would thank me cordially and lie down to another attack. Sometimes he would lose half the night in this exhausting slumber...."

  Sternberg never became rich hunting fossils, and indeed was often desperately poor, but he boasted proudly that he had made more money than if he had "utterly wasted" his life as a farmer or businessman. Like Brown, much of his success was due to his uncanny ability to turn up fossils in localities that had already been thoroughly combed by others. (He once claimed that rich fossil beds were revealed to him in dreams.) Sternberg usually collected alone or, later in his life, with his three sons, Charles Jr., George, and Levi, who went on to become notable fossil collectors them selves.

  Sternberg was a deeply religious man who wrote devotional poetry in his spare time, and he felt that God had particularly called him to the life of a fossil hunter. He published a wretched poem in quatrains entitled "The Story of the Past: Or, the Romance of Science."

  At one point in the poem, Sternberg described what it was like to discover a fossil—in this case a mosasaur (a huge, carnivorous marine reptile) which he had found in the chalk beds of Kansas:

  A grinning skull first comes in sight,

  Armed with strong teeth, all shining bright.

  The spinal column follows fast,

  On either side great paddles cast,

  While a long tail of swimming form,

  Like a screw propeller it is borne.

  The mended bones show us the place,

  Where he was injured in the chase....

  Among his other accomplishments, Sternberg discovered one of the Museum's greatest fossils. The story begins in 1908, when Sternberg wrote to the British Museum of Natural History. He knew the British Museum lacked a good Triceratops skull, and he offered his services. The British Museum wrote back and agreed to purchase a specimen if one was found, but would not commit itself to funding the expedition. Sternberg gave the British Museum first refusal on any other specimens as well. There was good reason to be skeptical, since the area where Sternberg claimed he could find the fossil, Converse County, Wyoming, had been thoroughly searched by the American Museum of Natural History some years before.