been moved in high water and packed together in random fashion, i.e., they were disarticulated. I was interviewed by a newspaper concerning the site, and, when the article was published, it stated that the bones were inarticulate, which would mean they couldn’t speak. However, in their own way, they spoke volumes.
Thus, in addition to working ten hours a day at the excavation, the beginning or the end of a typical day often found one simply in contemplation of the mysterious world of the dinosaurs, more of which was beginning to be revealed with each shovelful of dirt. Regarding such moments, the world-famous paleontologist Robert Bakker writes in his 1986 book, The Dinosaur Heresies, “Reverie is normal in Wyoming at sunrise. I suppose a no-nonsense laboratory scientist, clad in his white lab coat and steely-eyed objectivity, might think I was wasting my time communing with the spirit of the fossil beast. But scientists need long walks and quiet times at the quarry to let the whole pattern of fossil history sink into our consciousness.”
We would return year after year to this same spot, each time cutting in several feet to excavate a platform where we could work to expose and map the extent of the dinosaur material. Then came the process of removing the smaller bones, digging around the larger ones and applying plaster jackets so they could be safely removed, hauling them by rope and stretcher up the steep incline. The huge extent of the bone-bed on the cliff face was now apparent: it was more than four hundred yards wide. After several summers of such exploration by just the two of us, a crew of college students and adults was assembled to work for two or three weeks each summer. A small front-end loader was employed to remove some of the overburden in a process that resembled terracing a road on the side of a mountain. Over the course of a dozen years, more than 6,000 dinosaur bones were removed from the site, and it is likely that acres more still remain in that side-hill.
All the bones are from a single species of dinosaur, the large hadrosaur, or so-called “duckbilled” plant-eater named Edmontosaurus. In addition, we found a number of shed tyrannosaur teeth, suggesting the scene had been a windfall for the carnivores. Bones of other species are absent, indicating that this does not represent a gradual accumulation at the site over time but is the result of a single event. Collections like this, composed of individuals of different sizes, from quite small to nearly forty feet long, provide evidence that such creatures must have traveled in large herds, perhaps in migration. In the Far North, entire herds of caribou may drown in the attempt to cross a wide river in flood stage, and it may be that something similar happened here with a mass kill of dinosaurs. After the carcasses began to decompose, another high-water event must have separated and jumbled the skeletal elements and moved them downstream, there to become packed together and covered by sediment. Locked in the darkness, they remained until another river would begin to expose them to the light of day nearly 70 million earth orbits later and in an utterly different world.
Part of the message of the bones is delivered where they are found, in place. It is a truism in paleontology that as much as half the important data from a specimen can be obtained from its context in the field, paying attention to the conditions under which it was deposited in its original environment. The specimen is then fully excavated and moved to a museum or university lab, where it is cleaned, hardened, missing parts restored, i.e., “prepped” or prepared for study or display.
“Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.” So goes the old spiritual that talks about “the hip bone connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the knee bone,” and on and on. The song’s inspiration is, of course, that prophetic passage from Ezekiel chapter 37. The passage has inspired more than song.
Edwin H. Colbert was one of the leading paleontologists of the previous generation; for more than three decades, he was curator of dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He once spoke to his research staff with a huge sauropod or “brontosaur” pelvic bone in front of him, saying: “Bones are truly fascinating things, marvels of structure and form . . . Everything about a bone has meaning: it is a structure shaped for strength or for a particular function . . . it is an integral element of a dynamic, mobile creature, the complexity of which makes our vaunted mechanical vehicles seem simple and crudely limited.”
One thinks here of the words of Walt Whitman, “The narrowest hinge of my hand puts to scorn all machinery.” Colbert continued:
The astute paleontologist sees in his fossils more than petrified bones . . . In his mind’s eye he can clothe the bones with muscles and other soft parts of living animals, and he can cover the ancient animals with skin or scales or hair and picture them as they once appeared in their native environment . . . One might think that he is akin to Ezekiel, who said: “So I prophesied . . . and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I beheld, and lo, there were sinews upon them, and flesh came up and skin covered them above . . . and breath came into them, and they lived.” These are the undisputed remains of animals that lived great ages ago, and it is about them that we must speak. May our words never be dry.
Not every dinosaur specimen arrives at a museum or research facility, in fact, far from it. Today, fewer and fewer do, because of the dramatic increase in commercial collecting over the past two decades. Private collectors, as well as companies established for this purpose, sell specimens. A few go to museums that buy fossils (most museums do not), but many of them go to private individuals, and many go overseas without scientists ever seeing them. The situation was exacerbated when, in 1997, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex, nicknamed “Sue,” was auctioned off for more than 8 million dollars. A number of T. rex specimens have been found since, but the incident surely contributed to the commercialization of fossils, especially dinosaurs, and the granting of permission to search for scientific purposes on private land has sharply declined since. I have been extremely fortunate to work with several landowners who have a fine concern for science in general and for the educational value of such objects.
It is a complex situation. On the one hand, some fossils are common, including many invertebrates. Entire mountain ranges are made of limestone, which means they are literally composed of uncountable trillions of organisms that flourished in ancient seas. Some vertebrate animals have left abundant fossils, also. Sharks, for instance, shed and replace their teeth continually; a single one may shed thousands in a lifetime. The same was true in prehistory, making for huge numbers of fossil shark teeth.
On the other hand, some types, such as many dinosaur fossils, are rare; indeed, some are one of a kind. These represent priceless clues to the history of life on earth and should belong to posterity, instead of becoming mere commodities that go to the highest bidder. It is sometimes to “make ends meet” that such items are sold, but not always. Some of the poorest people I know are farmers and ranchers but so are some of the richest. Where one stands on this issue seems to have little to do with wealth or the lack thereof. In response to the question, “How much is enough?” many will always answer, “Just a little more.” Some will say, “A person has to live, doesn’t he?” Yes, but the oft-unasked question is “What for?”
Thoreau wrote about a neighbor who lived on Flint’s pond, “who regarded even the wild ducks that settled in it as trespassers,” an individual who “would have drained it and sold it for the mud at its bottom.” It was “his farm where everything had its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him . . . on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.”
To illustrate the rarity and the scientific value of some specimens, consider the horned dinosaur Torosaurus. The first descriptions of the creature accented the fact that huge bony frill or shield extending from the back of the skull over the neck is much larger than that of its more common cousin, Triceratops, of which perhaps two hundred skulls have been found. In addition, the frill of Torosaurus has two large holes in it. The rarity of this beast can be seen by the fact that only three skulls had been found in more than one hundred years. The first two were located in 1891 by an expedition to Wyoming from Yale University. Those were approximately 50 percent complete
