Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  Swept by chill winds, fog, and almost daily rainfall, the flat top of Neblina presents a landscape that looks like nothing else on earth. Its deep sphagnum bogs are filled with insect-trapping pitcher plants and sundews, and its marshy fields are sprinkled with previously unknown grasses and flowers. Spectacular orchids and bromeliads abound. Skinny palms rising only ten to fifteen feet punctuate the mountain's dense, chest-high vegetation of stubby trees and bushes. Foot-long earthworms grow in the springy soil, and tarantulas often crawled into the expedition's tents.

  "Almost all the animals we brought back from the top of the mountain were unusual," said Rozen, "and many are certainly new species. These tepuis are like isolated islands, and it is quite possible that each mountaintop has its own set of unique species." (One of the few nonindigenous species of insect Rozen found at the top of Neblina was the Africanized honeybee, the "killer bee" that has caused so much concern recently.)

  Even at the base of Neblina, the expedition found new life. Gareth Nelson and Carl Ferraris, Museum ichthyologists, discovered dozens of new species of catfish and earacins (a small relative of the piranha) in the blackwater swamps that drain the tepui. They also identified a number of animals common to the jungle—fer-de-Iances, giant anacondas, monkeys, toucans, macaws, caimans, capybaras, peccaries, deer, tapirs, and even a jaguar.

  Many of the plants and animals found on the top of Neblina may derive from ancient lineages that stretch back hundreds of millions of years to the time when Africa and South America were joined in the "supercontinent" Pangaea. Neblina and its surrounding tepuis may also provide the key to complex evolutionary questions, such as how new species arise and how fast they evolve. In the Galapagos Islands, for example, Darwin found dramatic evidence for his theory of evolution by studying different finch species, all descended from one common ancestor, that lived on separate islands. The tepuis, biologically isolated from one another by stretches of impenetrable swamp, form a similar "laboratory" for the study of speciation. Believed to have once been a large, unified plateau with the same species distributed throughout, the plateau eroded into a series of isolated mountain-islands, each possibly evolving a unique assemblage of plants and animals. By studying the similarities and differences among related species on these mountaintops, scientists may eventually be able to arrive at a more general theory of evolutionary change.

  1. President Ulysses S. Grant lays the cornerstone to the Museum, June 2, 1874. (From Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 20, 1874)

  2. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' studio in Central Park, showing models of extinct creatures to be Included in the Paleozoic Museum planned for the park.

  3. "The American Museum of Natural History as it will appear when completed." (From an architect's drawing, published in Harper's Weekly, 1897. The central tower, called the "Hall of the Heavens," was never built; neither were the north or west facades. As of today, the Museum is still only two-thirds complete based on this plan.)

  4. The first Museum building, standing in a wasteland of undrained ponds, and piles of rock (1878).

  5. The Museum's first building on Manhattan Square (c. 1880). This photograph was taken from the rooftop of the newly built Dakota apartment building. Note the squatters' shanties in the middleground.

  6. Albert S. Bickmore's official portrait, photographed on May 11, 1908. Bickmore was the founder of Museum.

  7. The completed first building in what was to become the 77th Street facade, 1893.

  8. The Maritime Koryak tribe of Siberia, photographed on the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (c. 1900). The central post served as a ladder. The interior of the house is entirely coated with thick, greasy soot.

  9. The Ahnighito meteorite on the shore of Melville Bay in Greenland, about to be slid across rails greased with tallow to Robert E. Peary's ship, J897.

  10. Unloading the Ahnighito meteorite at the 50th Street pier, Manhattan, around the turn of the century.

  11. Automobile used to deliver collections to various schools for teaching purposes, 1908.

  12. The Museum Taxidermy and Exhibition Department in 1905.

  13. The Crocker Land Expedition with their dog teams crossing a mountain on an island north of Greenland (1915).

  14. A Diplodocus limb, the first discovery at Bone Cabin Quarry. The bones, fossilized remnants from an ancient Jurassic river bar, rested on and Just beneath the surface.

  15. The Diplodocus limb as shown on the Bone Cabin Quarry map.

  16. The first step in mounting a dinosaur skeleton is the construction of the metal framework. Shown here in a 1908 photograph is a trachodont mount.

  17. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the father of American paleontology.

  18. Barnum Brown's dinosaur hunting houseboat, at a camp on the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada, 1912.

  19. Dinosaur hunter Barnum Brown among Lower Belly River rocks near Sweetwater, Montana, 1914. Even in the field, Brown was always immaculately dressed.

  20. One dinosaur skeleton, as it appears before the fragments are assembled, cemented, and mounted. Barnum Brown (with bow tie) is in the background center.

  21. Assembling the great skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex in the Hall of Late Dinosaurs, 1915.

  22. Carl Akeley puts the finishing touches on the clay model for the big bull elephant in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, 1914.

  23. Carl Akeley at the edge of a volcano in the Belgian Congo, filming with the camera he invented, c. 1920s.

  24. Carl Akeley after being attacked by an elephant, in the bush in Kenya.

  25. An example of an early Museum hall: the Morgan Hall of Minerals and Gems, 1922.

  26. Roy Chapman Andrews, leader of the Central Asiatic Expedition, in Mongolia (1928).

  27. The expedition just outside the Great Wall of China at Wan Chuan Hsien, 1928. Lined up behind the expedition is the Chinese cavalry escort that protected the expedition from marauding soldiers and bandits in Inner Mongolia.

  28. The supply caravan of camels for the Central Asiatic Expedition crossing the dunes of Tsagan Nor. Tserin, the Mongolian guide, heads the caravan (1925).

  29. The Central Asiatic Expedition attempted to cross an apparently dry lake, but broke through the crust. Mongolia, 1928.

  30. Roy Chapman Andrews scans the desert in Mongolia for trails leading east into the Gobi Desert, 1928.

  31. The Central Asiatic Expedition just inside Nankan Pass with the Great Wall of China in the background, 1928.

  32. Roy Chapman Andrews and Walter Granger excavating dinosaur eggs at Erhlieu, Mongolia.

  33. "The mongol men of Hat-in-Sumu prefer to listen to the radio signals being received by Hill. We are greatly indebted to the radio station at Cavidi, Philippines, who kindly sent us time signals twice a day and which we received remarkably well at a distance of two thousand miles." (Original expedition caption. The time signals were necessary for the Central Asiatic Expedition to calculate their exact position by the sun and stars. Mongolia, 1928.)

  34. S. Harmsted Chubb in an elaborate rigging set up to photograph the back of a trotting horse for one of his osteological preparations.

  35. A rare photograph showing Ellis Hughes, the Welshman who stole the Willamette meteorite, and his son. The meteorite—the largest ever found in the U.S.—rests on the handmade cart Hughes used to transport the meteorite to his own land.

  36. The Willamette meteorite arriving at the Museum by horsedrawn cart. Note: the right wheels sinking into the roadway from the meteorite's immense weight.

  PART TWO

  THE GRAND TOUR

  The Museum today is a very different place from the Museum of half a century ago. Now, high technology laboratories filled with computers and electronic equipment can be found next door to storerooms full of human mummies or snakes coiled in jars of alcohol. The collections are being cared for and studied in ways that Roy Chapman Andrews never dreamed of.

  This next section of Dinosaurs in the Attic will take the reader on a grand armchair tour among the
labs, vaults, and corridors of the Museum today. Along the way, we will often stop to chat with a curator, poke around in a storage room, or take a short excursion in space and time to the initial discovery of a particularly unusual specimen. Our first stop along this ramble will be the dinosaur bone storage room, certainly one of the more remarkable places in New York City—if not the world.

  TEN

  A Library of Bones

  To get to the dinosaur bone storage room at the American Museum of Natural History, we must first descend to the main basement. Here, the labyrinthine route follows dim passageways lined with rumbling steam pipes. Off one of these corridors is a padlocked door, with a grubby sign taped to it that reads DINOSAUR STORAGE ROOM. The door opens into a large, starkly illuminated chamber. Stacks of metal shelves reach up into the gloom. Everywhere, we see bones. Huge dark bones shrouded in plastic lie on the shelves, while larger bones sit stacked on the floor or leaning against the wall. Slabs of rock containing twisted skeletons hang on the walls, and along the back of the room runs a workbench covered with dinosaur models, bones under study, and other odd-looking things. At the far end of the room and to the left, we see another door. Beyond this door is the basement to the Frick Building, a nine-story structure hidden in the center of the Museum's complex of buildings.

  The Frick Building is the heart of vertebrate paleontology research in the Museum. The building was donated to the Museum by a corporation started by the millionaire Childs Frick. Frick, the Barnum Brown of fossil mammal collections, donated his outstanding collection to the Museum; later his corporation gave half of the ten-story building required to house it. Row upon row of green metal cabinets containing fossil vertebrates fill this basement room. But this is only a small fraction of the collection. Above it are seven floors of nothing but storage, comprising the largest collection of fossil mammals and dinosaurs in the world. The weight of this collection is so great that it would collapse a normal building; consequently the Frick Building was built with special steel reinforcing elements. On the top three floors are labs and offices.

  In another area of the Museum—many winding passageways away from the dinosaurs—is the Whale Bone Storage Room. The whale collection is stored in an echoing, cavernous space that was once the Museum's powerhouse. Now, instead of massive generators, the room contains huge whale skulls and bones shrouded in plastic. The metal tracks and winches on the ceiling, once used for moving the giant machines, are now used for shifting the leviathans about. A peaceful light filters in through windows high on the walls, giving the room a hushed, mausoleumlike atmosphere.

  But this is only the beginning. In a Museum attic, for example, rests the Elephant Room. Downstairs from that, one can find the tusk vault, the boar vault, and hundreds of metal cabinets containing the skeletons of everything from giraffes to shrews.

  Moving even farther afield: in an office in the Anthropology Department stretch row upon row of cardboard boxes, all labeled and numbered, and each containing a human skull. Cabinets along the walls contain hanging human skeletons from all over the world.

  Wherever one looks, there are bones—bird bones in the Ornithology Department, lizard and tortoise bones in Herpetology, fish bones in Ichthyology—bones from a large proportion of the vertebrate species on earth. Even the Museum's official logo shows two skeletons: those of a man and a horse.

  If all the bones in the American Museum of Natural History were dumped into Central Park, they would form a pile well over three stories high and hundreds of feet in circumference. A very rough calculation indicates the pile would weigh at least 1,000 tons and contain about 50 million bones, representing the remains of more than 750,000 animals.

  This mountain of bones has been gathered from every comer of the earth—from Outer Mongolia to East 59th Street. The people who brought this mountain together endured blizzards, sandstorms, bandits, and a host of other hardships. Some collectors even risked their lives or spent their personal fortunes in the effort. Almost all the bones—more than 99 percent—were collected for scientific purposes and are not on public display. More than two hundred scientists and their assistants conduct research in the Museum, much of which focuses on bones.

  Why should such vast resources be devoted to collecting, cataloguing, storing, and caring for 50 million bones? Of what significance is this research? Why study bones? Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to visit one Museum scientist who does study bones: paleontologist Malcolm McKenna.

  There can be no mistaking McKenna's office: boxes of fossil bones, all carefully labeled and numbered, cover most of the tables in the spacious room. McKenna himself has collected most of the specimens he studies, because such specimens are not present in the general collection. During his thirty-odd years in paleontology, McKenna has prospected for extremely rare fossils of early mammals just about everywhere—from Greenland to Patagonia.

  McKenna brings out a plastic box filled with his recent finds, which look like so many tiny chips of stone. Early mammals were small, and these pieces are actually hundreds of minuscule fossil teeth, tiny jaws a quarter-inch in length, and other irregular bits of fossil bone. In all, the box holds less than two ounces of fossils. They date, McKenna says, from about 66 million years ago, and were discovered in Cretaceous beds at Lance Creek, Wyoming. This type of collection is more typical of the Museum today than in the past. Although they lack the glamour of the huge dinosaurs, in many ways they may actually be more important.

  These fossils are rare—exceedingly rare. "To get this little box of jaws and teeth," McKenna says, "a field crew of eight people had to process five tons of matrix every day for a week." McKenna spends most of his summers in the field collecting fossils such as these. Over the years, he has developed a collecting method that differs radically from the way Barnum Brown, for example, collected fossils. He doesn't collect individual fossils at all; instead, he collects entire fossil communities—fossil ecologies, so to speak. To accomplish this, McKenna has to extract almost every fossil larger than a small pebble from a particular deposit.

  McKenna seeks a picture of the life of one entire community at a particular point in time. Since bones are usually the only things that survive into future eras, he must of necessity study them. Bones can provide us with an extraordinary amount of information, especially when combined with research in other areas such as astronomy and geology.

  "My research," he explains, "requires the highest-resolution data—the most detailed and complete picture possible." To accomplish this, McKenna needs thousands of bones, not just a few. To obtain such large quantities, he has his field crew dig up the fossil-bearing matrix, which at Lance Creek is made up of ancient channel sands cross-bedded with layers of clay, and dump it in water. (The highest concentrations of the fossils McKenna is after can be found in what he calls "fossil garbage dumps" in ancient streambeds, where flash floods and other processes have deposited a great assortment of bones, many of them originally contained in carnivore scat.) When the matrix has loosened in the water, it is sifted through a fine wire-mesh screen. The screen catches thousands of pebbles—and, if McKenna and his crew are lucky, a fossil tooth or two. In one day, working in assembly-line fashion, the crew can process 550 twenty-pound boxes of matrix. "It's very tedious work," McKenna says. "You have to go through a lot of beer and Cutty Sark just to find one fossil." Indeed, one of McKenna's colleagues named a toothy new species Cuttysarkus mcnallyi because the discoverer, a member named McNally, had been promised a bottle of the Scotch if he found a mammal jaw with six or more teeth in it.

  McKenna's collecting method is tedious but wonderfully efficient. "The first day we spent at Lance Creek in 1956," McKenna says, "we collected more fossils than everyone else since the fossil locality was discovered." Yet the fossils are so rare that, even using McKenna's method, an entire summer's work could fit in a small piece of carry-on luggage for the return flight to New York.

  McKenna pokes his finger around in the box of fossils. "This bo
x represents," he says, "a picture of the animal life of one particular area at one particular moment in time—in this case, about 66 million years ago, around the time of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous." Lance Creek has fossils of about eighty kinds of animals, including fishes, lizards, tiny and large dinosaurs, frogs, salamanders, birds, and early mammals. "I keep the mammal bones," McKenna says, "and spin off the rest of the fossils to other scientists."