juvenile skull was found in South Dakota by the Philadelphia Academy of Science. Then, in Montana in 1996, I excavated a huge Torosaurus skull and delivered it to the world-class Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman, which now houses the largest collection of American dinosaur specimens in the world. It is there that I have practiced my serious avocation as a research associate in paleontology. At nine feet long, it was the largest dinosaur skull in the world.
Rare as they are, I thought I would never see another one in the ground. Then, in 1999, I was visiting a rancher and seeking permission to explore his land, something he readily gave. As I was about to leave, he took me into his garage to show me a piece of bone he had picked up twenty-five years earlier. It was apparent to me that it was a fragment of the skull of a ceratopsian or horned dinosaur, so I was anxious to see how much more could be found. The site was located, and over the next few weeks I made seven trips there to begin exposing what would turn out to be specimen number five of Torosaurus, the most complete and best preserved one yet. The next summer, several of us from the Museum of the Rockies were involved in the remainder of the excavation at the base of a twenty-five foot cliff. Jackhammers, picks, and shovels were used to cut a pickup-sized cave in the sandstone wall and the skull was jacketed in two pieces that together weighed an estimated four thousand pounds. Another winter passed, but in the summer of 2001 the Army National Guard was available for a training exercise in which two Black Hawk helicopters would lift what could be moved in no other way. On July 21, at the crack of dawn, when the air is most still, the great skull nine feet long and over six feet wide rose into the air. (One of the pilots said later, “I don’t know why we had to get up at three-thirty in the morning to come and get something that’s been in the ground for 68 million years!”)
The event was filmed by several media outlets and carried “live” by NBC television’s Today Show, and CNN picked it up and sent it around the world. It was an event illustrating both the popularity of dinosaurs and the large number of people and the amount of resources necessary to rightly handle a specimen of this importance.
The world-renowned dinosaur specialist Jack Horner, who oversaw the excavation, was asked, “So, is this the kind of moment paleontologists live for?” “Well, it certainly is,” he replied. “The next great moment will be when we can get it to the Museum where everyone can see it.”
And that’s the point. Such things belong to the ages. The two giant skulls are now central exhibits in a new dinosaur hall, where their bones will speak to the public of the diversity of life through time. Over generations, millions of people will be able to see them and most will surely stand in awe before these, two of the largest skulls of any land animal ever.
Torosaurus has been known by that name for more than a century, but an unexpected perspective was recently provided by a scientific paper published in 2010 by Horner and one of his graduate students, in which they conclude that the few existing skulls of Torosaurus may actually be the final growth stage of very aged individuals of Triceratops. In a situation not uncommon in paleontology, a number of others disagree, illustrating the sort of debates that often take place in science. However, and in line with “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” these specimens—whatever their designation—are still of wonderful creatures from the primeval world of the dinosaurs and, as such, will continue to stir the imagination.
The word “museum” comes from the root verb “to muse,” i.e., to think, to reflect, consider, or to wonder. This is a purpose far deeper than mere entertainment, which usually consists of a-musement, i.e., to not think, to neither consider nor wonder. Among the latter is much television programming, wherein the average scene is three and a half seconds. One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s visit to New York City when he was being driven down Broadway. About the profusion of neon lights and advertising, he said that it must be beautiful, if you cannot read.
Natural history museums exist to expand our understanding; we cannot wisely guide our course in relationship to the life-systems on which we depend without sound knowledge of how they operate. Practical considerations aside, they also have the purpose of eliciting our admiration for the dynamics of planet earth and the complexity of life. Without that, it is as though we stand in a gallery that has the great works of art all facing the wall. A simple appreciation of our place in nature is essential to our humanity.
There is, however, a subtle danger to which institutions are prone as they attempt to describe the natural world. Many nature and science museums are not as much about nature as they are about technology. Even when the subject is that of various animals, the fact that robotics and synthetic sounds often dominate will lead to the subconscious focus not on the creature but on the human inventor. Nature is divided into bite-sized segments that are isolated from their contexts and hyped by electronics. The displays are often, therefore, less about the world and more about our domination of it. It is a mentality with a long pedigree, as Cicero boasted, “We are absolute masters of what the earth produces. We enjoy the mountains and the plains . . . We sow the seed and plant the trees. We fertilize the earth . . . We stop, direct, and turn the rivers. In short, by our hands we endeavor by our various operations in this world to make it, as it were, another nature.”
Consider the zoo in almost any large urban center, even the most spacious and ecologically minded, and, in the words of Scott Russell Sanders:
You will find nature parceled out into showy fragments, a nature demeaned and dominated by our constructions. Thickets of bamboo and simulated watering holes cannot disguise the elementary fact that a zoo is a prison. The animals are captives, hauled to this space for our edification or entertainment. No matter how ferocious they may look, they are wholly dependent on our care. A bear squatting on its haunches, a tiger lounging with half-lidded eyes, a bald eagle hunched on a limb are like refugees who tell us less about their homeland, their native way of being, than about our power . . . Snared in our inventions, wearing our labels, the plants and animals stand mute. In such places, the loudest voice we hear is our own.
Planetariums simulate not only the naked-eye vision of the sky but sights from deep space that, otherwise, would be closed to all but a few. As such, they more nearly facilitate the muse. Some things, of course, should not need such help. A few decades ago, when, for the first time, a lunar eclipse was shown on television, most people watched it on the silver screen, this when they could have stepped outside and seen the real thing.
A dinosaur bone, however, needs neither magnification nor exaggeration. It is what it is, whether in isolation or in an articulated skeleton: a tangible artifact from a creature that lived in an inconceivably remote period on planet earth.
Museums often use casts made from molds of the bones. These are near-identical reproductions and have several advantages, including that they can be shipped across the world for study or posed in mounts when the actual bone would be too heavy or fragile or when such exhibits would be too costly. But the authentic bone itself has a mystique that is unrivaled. Even the first-graders have learned to ask about a dinosaur specimen, “Is it real?” If not, at least some of the interest departs. If it is real, the eyes grow wide with excitement and wonder. The fact that museums can display such objects of fascination, often close-up, contributes to the popularity of the whole subject of dinosaurs. Some have called dinosaurs “nature’s special effects,” with the added attraction that they were real.
It is quite an understatement to say, concerning the role of dinosaurs in today’s culture, that they are popular. It was in 1842 that England’s Sir Richard Owen coined the name dinosaur to describe a new order of reptiles, this after the Greek words deinos for “terrible” or “frightfully great” and sauros, for “lizard.” Deinos might be equally well translated “awful,” this in the original sense of awe-full, and “Awesome!” is a phrase heard often in dinosaur halls these days.
The fascination with things prehistoric has meant that paleontologists who study dinosaurs no longer work in obscurity but have become celebrities. Blockbuster movies like Steven
