by Steve Fiffer
wants to know that."
Larson had plenty to tell. He had been collecting fossils since 1956,
when at the age of 4, he had spied a small brownish object in a ditch
near the small farm on which he lived near Mission, South Dakota,
some 200 miles southeast of M o u n t Rushmore. His parents took him to
Mission, where friends June a n d Albert Zeitner, w h o ran a small geo-
logic m u s e u m , identified the find as the tooth of an oreodont, a camel-
like m a m m a l that lived 25 million years ago.
1 0 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
"From that day on, I knew I wanted to h u n t fossils," he says. "Here
was something millions of years old, extinct, but it was still here. That
was unbelievable. I loved living animals. I wanted to k n o w the stories of
the animals that weren't here anymore." Within a few years, he and his
younger brother Neal and their older brother Mark had collected
enough fossils and rocks to open up a " m u s e u m " in a 12-foot-by- 15-
foot outbuilding on their property, which lay within the borders of the
Rosebud Indian Reservation. While other kids played cowboys and
Indians, "we played curator," Larson says. They charged the adults in
their family five cents admission.
By eighth grade, Larson had won the state science fair with an
exhibit on fossils. "I was kind of a nerd," he confesses.
In 1970, he enrolled at the South Dakota School of Mines and
Technology, one of the few schools he could afford to attend. There he
majored in geology only because there was no major in paleontology.
The pragmatic powers at the school pushed Larson and his fellow
majors towards careers in the oil industry. Larson wasn't interested. "I
wanted to h u n t for fossils," he says.
Henry Fairfield Osborn, the distinguished scientist w h o founded
the D e p a r t m e n t of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of
Natural History in 1897 and then headed the institution when it rose to
p r o m i n e n c e at the beginning of the twentieth century, provided a job
description of the fossil hunter, circa 1909:
T h e fossil h u n t e r must first of all be a scientific enthusiast. He
m u s t be willing to endure all kinds of hardships, to suffer cold
in the early spring and the late a u t u m n and early winter
m o n t h s , to suffer intense heat and the glare of the sun in s u m -
mer m o n t h s , and he must be prepared to drink alkali water, and
in some regions to fight off the attack of the mosquito and
other pests. He must be something of an engineer in order to
handle large masses of stone and transport them over roadless
wastes of desert to the nearest shipping point; he must have a
delicate and skillful touch to preserve the least fragments of
b o n e when fractured; he must be content with very plain living,
because the profession is seldom if ever, remunerative, a n d he is
almost invariably underpaid; he must find his chief reward and
IT M U S T BE A T. REX 1 1
stimulus in the sense of discovery and in the dispatching of
specimens to m u s e u m s which he has never seen for the benefit
of a public which has little knowledge or appreciation of the
self-sacrifices which the fossil hunter has made.
This was the ideal Larson aspired to when, after graduating from
college in 1974, he a n d fellow student Jim H o n e r t went into business—
finding small fossils, rocks, and minerals a n d selling t h e m to colleges.
Their company, Black Hills Minerals, a n d its successor, the Black Hills
Institute, weren't b o r n of a desire to get rich. However, they were for-
profit ventures. "I'm a capitalist," says Peter Larson. "I'm p r o u d to be a
capitalist. I think the capitalist system works. It creates m o n e y so that
wonderful things can happen."
Larson a n d H o n e r t quickly realized that colleges weren't the only
institutions that wanted their finds. Says Larson, "It became increasing-
ly obvious that m u s e u m s really needed the service, because they had no
way to get them. They didn't have the funds to send full-time people out
searching for fossils or preparing fossils for exhibition."
The shift from h a n d specimens to m u s e u m pieces eventually sent
Larson searching for the biggest fossil of all. In 1977, the Natural History
Museum of Vienna, to which Larson had helped sell an ancient turtle,
said it would like a dinosaur. By this time he was operating as Black Hills
Minerals and had been joined by his brother Neal and Bob Farrar, both
graduates of the School of Mines. "We said, ' N o problem,'" Larson
laughs, adding, "We didn't have a dinosaur. We didn't even k n o w where
to dig dinosaurs."
Two years later they journeyed to Faith, 150 miles northeast of Hill
City, at the invitation of an octogenarian n a m e d Ruth Mason. Her land
lies in a stretch of badlands called the Hell Creek Formation. As a young
girl Ms. Mason had found what she thought were dinosaur bones on her
property and had been trying to interest paleontologists in digging there
since the early 1900s. The Larsons were the first to take her up on her
offer.
In his book The Complete T. Rex, paleontologist Jack Horner, cura-
tor of the M u s e u m of the Rockies, based in Bozeman, M o n t a n a , p r o -
vides the following "recipe" for making a fossil: "An animal dies. Soon
after death its flesh rots away. Over time sediment covers the bones.
1 2 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
That sediment compacts into rock. Minerals enter into the bone within
the rock and preserve it." Recent experiments suggest that bacteria asso-
ciated with the decaying carcass cause the minerals to precipitate out of
groundwater, thereby fossilizing the bone.
Sand and silt are necessary recipe ingredients. Just add water—a
slow-moving stream or river clogged with dirt or debris will d o — a n d
voila! Of course, there is quite a bit of time between preparation and
presentation; only after erosion occurs and the rock is swept away will
the fossilized bones be visible.
The age of dinosaurs began d u r i n g the Mesozoic Era about 225 mil-
lion years ago and lasted for 160 million years, through the Triassic,
Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. T h e Hell Creek Formation and equiv-
alent formations, which extend from South Dakota into Wyoming,
Montana, and the Canadian province of Alberta, were the perfect kit-
chens for fossil creation during the final one or two million years of the
Cretaceous period, which lasted from about 144 million BC to 65 mil-
lion BC. What is n o w n o r t h central N o r t h America was warm and
swampy then, with shallow seas and winding rivers—not cool and bar-
ren as it is today.
D u r i n g the Cretaceous period the landscape was rich in flora simi-
lar to the vegetation one finds in the southern United States today—
ferns, flowering plants, palm trees, a n d redwoods. Some of the creatures
that moved about this landscape or flew above it or swam in the seas
and rivers live on today. Birds filled the skies. Sharks and turtles swam
the seas
a n d rivers. Insects such as spiders and m a m m a l s similar to the
o p o s s u m were a b u n d a n t (although during the entire 150 million years
dinosaurs ruled the earth, no m a m m a l got m u c h larger than a house
cat).
O t h e r Cretaceous creatures, which have not survived the last 65
million years, were also plentiful. Many of these were reptiles. The fly-
ing pterosaurs d o m i n a t e d the air. Fish-like ichthyosaurs inhabited the
seas, as did giant marine lizards, the mosasaurs. And, of course, dino-
saurs r o a m e d the earth.
Many kinds of dinosaurs had already become extinct as the
Cretaceous period drew to a close, b u t large herds of duck-bills and
Triceratops still moved about. They spent their s u m m e r s in the north,
then migrated south to w a r m e r climes for the winter. Dominating the
IT M U S T BE A T. REX 13
landscape was another dinosaur—a ferocious carnivore that stood
upwards of a dozen feet at the hip and upwards of 35 feet long from
head to tail— Tyrannosaurus rex.
On Mason's land, the Larsons soon found remains of the duck-
billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens. And not just one dinosaur.
Inexplicably, thousands of duck-bills had died there a n d were deposited
as a b o n e bed in the graveyard quarry.
The institute team spent the better part of the next two years exca-
vating bones and then trying to piece t h e m together to reconstruct a
complete dinosaur. Finally, in the spring of 1981, Peter Larson took the
assembled bones to Switzerland. There, he hoped to sell the specimen
with the help of Kirby Siber, w h o had invested m o n e y in the project.
The two m e n had first met in the mid-1970s at a gem and mineral
show in Tucson, Arizona. Larson, just starting out in the business, had
brought several specimens to sell. He had mixed emotions about part-
ing with his favorite, a pearl-white a m m o n i t e , an extinct relative of the
chambered nautilus. "I marked it outrageously high, $700, because I
really didn't want to sell it," he remembers. A French collector offered
$450. "No thanks," said Larson. Finally, another buyer offered the full
$700. This time Larson said, "Thanks." The institute could use the
money.
Soon Larson learned that the purchaser, w h o t u r n e d out to be Siber,
had immediately resold the a m m o n i t e . . . for $1400. Any ill will toward
Siber was mitigated by the fact that the Swiss paleontologist b o u g h t sev-
eral pieces from Larson at the show, giving the institute a bit of finan-
cial breathing r o o m .
Although the duck-bill Larson took to Switzerland had been exca-
vated over a three-year period, the institute had yet to receive any
m o n e y for the thousands of m a n - h o u r s already spent on the project at
the Mason Q u a r r y and in the preparation lab; Larson had never signed
a contract with the Viennese m u s e u m . To stay afloat during this period,
the institute had borrowed about $60,000, some at an interest rate
exceeding 20 percent.
While in Switzerland, Larson learned that the m u s e u m did n o t have
the funds to purchase the duck-bill. With no apparent means for meet-
ing his loan obligation, he feared that he might have to go out of busi-
ness. Fortunately, another commercial collector, Allen Graffliam, put
1 4 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
h i m in touch with the Ulster M u s e u m in Belfast, Ireland. The m u s e u m
paid $150,000 for the dinosaur, but Larson didn't see any of that money
until 1988. After paying Graffham his sales commission and Siber for
his investment, the institute ended up making less than $1 per h o u r on
the transaction, Larson estimates.
Teams from the institute worked the q u a r r y for duck-bills through-
out the 1980s, eventually reconstructing nine m o r e specimens, the last
three bringing m o r e than $300,000 each from m u s e u m s in Japan,
Europe, and the United States. D u r i n g this period, Larson spent time
collecting in South America as well as in South Dakota. In 1985 the
institute and the Peruvian government entered into a partnership that
yielded several scientifically i m p o r t a n t specimens, including a new fam-
ily of sharks and a previously u n k n o w n marine sloth. Larson, Siber, and
Hendrickson also donated their time a n d m o n e y to build a m u s e u m off
the Pan American Highway south of the Peruvian city of Nasca. The
m u s e u m features a 12-million-year-old baleen whale that is displayed
where it was discovered—in the sands of a desert that was once ocean.
By 1990, the institute had become o n e of the largest suppliers of
m u s e u m specimens in the world, doing business with, a m o n g others,
the Smithsonian Institution, American M u s e u m of Natural History,
Field M u s e u m , Carnegie Institute, H o u s t o n M u s e u m of Natural
Sciences, Denver M u s e u m of Natural History, Natural History M u s e u m
of Los Angeles County, Yale's Peabody M u s e u m , and m u s e u m s in
Germany, Japan, a n d Great Britain. The institute was also one of the
largest employers in Hill City (population 650), with a full-time staff of
eleven working out of the former American Legion Hall on Main Street.
The bright white two-story Art Deco structure built by the WPA during
the Depression housed the institute's offices, library, fossil preparation
lab, storage area, and gift shop, and it featured a modest showroom that
attracted a small percentage of the 2 million tourists w h o came to the
Black Hills each year to visit nearby M o u n t Rushmore. This showroom
had no T. rex. Rather, it exhibited considerably smaller finds such as a
y h - i n c h tooth from a 60-foot long prehistoric shark and n u m e r o u s col-
orful a m m o n i t e s .
Over the years, the institute has sold s o m e finds for considerable
a m o u n t s of money. Still, n o n e of the principals has become wealthy.
Excavation and reconstruction of specimens is extremely costly, and, as
IT M U S T BE A T. REX 15
the case of the Ulster duck-bill illustrates, sales transactions sometimes
take years. As self-described "Republican paleontologists," the Larson
brothers rejected the idea of applying for government grants because of
their distaste for bureaucracy.
Peter Larson, w h o lives in an old trailer a few yards from the insti-
tute's back door, cites another reason for his bare-bones existence. "We
set aside the best specimens for the m u s e u m we'd always dreamed of
building."
The Larson brothers did not charge admission to the institute's
showroom, and they didn't plan on charging admission to the m u s e u m
of their dreams, if and when it ever became a reality. "Education is the
most i m p o r t a n t thing, and we don't believe people should have to pay
for education," says Neal Larson. He a n d Peter and other institute
staffers give 30 to 60 school talks a year, taking their fossil displays
a r o u n d the Black Hills area. They also speak to amateur groups, rock
clubs, and colleges and take people out collecting free of char
ge.
The Larsons, Hendrickson, and an institute crew that included
Peter's 10-year old son Matthew and Neal's 15-year-old son Jason, spent
m u c h of the s u m m e r of 1990 in the area a r o u n d the Mason Quarry.
Shortly after the fossil hunters arrived, they found a dead horse belong-
ing to Maurice Williams, a one-quarter Native American whose large cat-
tle ranch on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation lay just to the east of
Ms. Mason's property. W h e n Williams came by to claim the animal, he
asked Peter Larson about the dig. "He was fascinated," says Larson. "He
said, 'I've got land with badlands on it. Why don't you come over and
look for dinosaurs?' I said, 'Great. We don't pay a lot, but if we find some-
thing of significance, we'll pay you.'" Williams also suggested that Larson
call his brother Sharkey, w h o owned similar land in the area. Sharkey
Williams, now deceased, also invited the institute to dig on his property.
While the institute team initially found little on Maurice Williams's
land, they did find a few partial Triceratops skulls on his brother's p r o p -
erty. On the m o r n i n g of August 12, they were preparing to excavate a
skull when they noticed a flat tire on their collecting truck, a rusting,
green 1975 Suburban. They changed the tire and saw that the spare was
also dangerously low on air. His tire p u m p broken, Larson decided to
drive into Faith to get the two tires fixed. He invited Hendrickson to join
h i m on the 45-minute drive.
1 6 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
She declined. The dig was to end in a couple of days, and she want-
ed to explore the sandstone cliff that had been calling her ever since she
had spied it from several miles away two weeks earlier. "I'd kept think-
ing, I gotta get over there," Hendrickson recalls, "but you're so tired, just
physically exhausted at the end of the day." Maurice Williams had asked
that they keep their vehicles off his property, so Hendrickson knew that
she would have to walk to the cliff over rugged terrain. Now she finally
had the time to do it.
"It was foggy," she says. "It never gets foggy in South Dakota in the
s u m m e r , but it was foggy that day." Although the rare mist prevented
her from seeing her destination, Hendrickson set out with her dog on
the 7-mile hike to the cliff. "I told myself, 'Don't walk in a circle,' but