Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  Sternberg was accompanied on this expedition by his three sons, who had at this point never collected a dinosaur before. They were highly enthusiastic and spent weeks scouring the remote desert without success. When their food began to run out (their diet was almost exclusively boiled potatoes), Sternberg reluctantly saddled up his horse and cart for the five-day round trip for provisions. Just before he left, his son George had found some bones sticking out of a sandstone outcropping. Sternberg gave George and Levi instructions for uncovering the fossil while he and his son Charles Jr. went into town. In his memoirs, George Sternberg wrote about the discovery:

  Finally by the evening of the third day, I had traced the skeieton to the breast bone, for it lay on its back with the ends of its ribs sticking up. There was nothing unusual about that. But when I removed a rather large piece of sandstone rock from over the breast I found, much to my surprise, a perfect cast of the skin impression beautifully preserved ... traces of skin were to be seen everywhere.

  When his father returned to camp, George told him about the discovery, and the father insisted on visiting the site immediately. The two arrived at the site in the gathering dusk. "One glance," George wrote, "was enough for my father to realize what I had found and what it meant to science. Will I ever forget his first remark as we stood there in the fast approaching twilight? It thrills me now as I repeat it. 'George, this is a finer fossil than I have ever found.'"

  What George had found was no mere dinosaur skeleton. It was a fossilized mummy of a dinosaur, a kind popularly called a "duck-billed" dinosaur because of its large bill-like mouth. Skin, tendons, and shreds of flesh—all fossilized—clung to the dinosaur's gaping ribcage. The animal's head was twisted grotesquely behind its back.*16 Sternberg, in his Life of a Fossil Hunter, also wrote about the discovery:

  Shall I ever experience such joy as when I stood in the quarry for the first time, and beheld lying in state the most complete skeleton of an extinct animal I have ever seen, after forty years of experience as a collector! The crowning specimen of my life's work! ... It lay there with expanded ribs as in life, wrapped in the impressions of skin whose beautiful patterns of octagonal plates marked the fine sandstone above the bones. . . . Even the flesh was replaced by sandstone. . . . How wonderful are the works of an Almighty hand!

  Osborn had previously written to Sternberg expressing his doubt that the area would yield anything of value, but he had been keeping a wary eye on his activities anyway. When news of the find reached Osborn, he immediately dispatched a man to Converse County to secure the specimen, despite the fact that the British Museum, according to paleontological etiquette, had a prior claim to it. The Museum's agent appealed to Sternberg's patriotic principles with the promise that the specimen would remain in the country on display. A substantial (but unknown) cash payment sealed the deal. The duck-billed dinosaur mummy was encased in plaster and shipped to New York, where Osborn installed it in a glass case labeled "Mummy Dinosaur." It can still be seen in the Museum's Hall of Late Dinosaurs, lying in a glass case on its back, looking so much like the partially decomposed carcass it once was that one can almost smell it. Its grinning skull, partially clothed in flesh, still arcs behind the body, and traces of fossilized flesh and pebbled skin are everywhere.

  Sternberg collected other specimens for the Museum, but the duck-billed mummy was certainly the finest. For the first time, paleontologists were able to study the skin of a dinosaur and other details not detectable from a skeleton. In his final years, Sternberg would visit the Museum's dinosaur halls, admiring his finds. After one such visit to the dinosaur mummy, he was inspired to write, "My own body will crumble in dust, my soul return to the God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of other days, will give joy and pleasure to generations yet unborn."

  SEVEN

  In Deepest Africa

  The Belgian Congo, high on the slopes of Mount Mikeno. Tuesday and Wednesday, November 16 and 17, 1926:

  Mr. Akeley, in effect, is growing worse and worse [the Belgian zoologist J. M. Derscheid wrote in his field journal], and I was overwhelmed by the change in his appearance. We try with every means at our disposal to keep him warm and sustain him. He has had one hemorrhage after another today, and is dreadfully weak and pale. In the last hemorrhage he lost more than a quart of blood.... He breathes with great difficulty and groans unceasingly.... During the evening he has been delerious several times, and speaks of Museum, of electrical projects, etc., etc...."

  [That night.} We take turns in watching over him. Outside, the snow-covered Karisimbi glitters in the moonlight.

  At eight o'clock [A.M.] I found the pulse practically imperceptible. I asked Mr. Akeley if we might give him a hypodermic injection; he consented and I gave him a dose of caffeine. At about nine o'clock the pulse had become strong again, but the respiration remained abrupt, short and noisy. He groaned unceasingly and was entirely unconscious. I frictioned him. About eleven o'clock the heart action fell again. I gave him another injection of caffeine, but this time without result. About 11:35 there was no pulse or respiration perceptible. I had the impression he was dead. I held his hand in both of mine, watching for any sign of life. The mouth was wide open, the muscles stiffened, the eyes open in a fixed stare. As it was quite cold outside (the frost had not yet melted). I had the little tent kept very warm. I made two more injections of caffeine, but in vain. The head and the hands were growing cold, and the complexion was becoming a dull white, but it was not until about four-thirty that Mr. Raddatz and I were able to convince ourselves of the reality.

  The Gorilla Group in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals depicts an actual place located less than a mile from the camp where Carl Akeley, the African explorer, died in 1926. The spot is located in the Kivu Volcanoes of the Belgian Congo, two miles high in the rain-forested slopes of Mount Mikeno (now in the Virunga National Park in Zaire, just over the border from Rwanda and Uganda). It lies just south of the Equator, in the center of the African continent. In the foreground of the diorama, a family of mountain gorillas forages for food, while the dominant male stands erect in a classic pose, beating its chest. An infant and several other gorillas sit nearby, munching on wild celery leaves. A massive tree trunk, sheathed in moss, lies rotting in the center of the scene. Framing the gorillas is a tangle of vines and ancient cusso trees, their heavy limbs hanging with moss, ferns, bearded lichen, and pendant bedstraw. Brilliant flowers and Ruwenzori blackberries grow in abundance. Behind the gorillas, the rain forest falls away into a steep declivity, dropping four thousand feet to sun-dappled plains and forests. Two giant volcanoes, Mount Nyiragongo and Mount Nyamlagira, smoke lazily in the distance, their clouds catching the amber light of late afternoon. Below and to the south lies the shining expanse of Lake Kivu. Almost invisible in the haze, at least a hundred miles away, can be seen another great mountain range on the far side of the lake. To the right rise the precipitous ramparts of Mount Mikeno itself, thickly covered with jungle foliage displaying an almost infinite range of greens and yellows. It is a scene of breathtaking beauty.

  At the time of his death, Akeley was leading a small expedition to this wild and remote area of the Belgian Congo to collect plants and animals, take photographs, and paint background studies for the gorilla diorama. It was the culmination of nearly seventeen years of work on the Museum's African Hall. Accompanying Akeley were his wife, Mary L. Jobe Akeley—a well-known explorer in her own right—and three other scientists. Although Carl was sixty-two, he had recently married Mary, and this was their first trip to Africa together—a honeymoon of sorts. Carl especially wanted to bring his wife to see "the most beautiful spot in all the world"—the break in the trees that he had chosen for the gorilla diorama setting and background.

  During the long trip into the African interior, Carl experienced a relapse of the fever and dysentery that had stricken him on an earlier expedition in Tanganyika, yet he insisted on pushing on. As they at last approached their destination, a camp on a high rid
ge between volcanoes, commanding a spectacular vista across one hundred miles of the western Congo, Akeley had to be carried much of the time in a hammock. The following day he died.

  Akeley's long journey to the rain-drenched jungles of Mount Mikeno began when he was a young boy. At an early age he had developed an interest in stuffing animals, and at sixteen he felt competent enough in this profession to print up business cards that read, "Carl E. Akeley—Artistic Taxidermy in All Its Branches." At nineteen he landed a job at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, at a wage of $3.50 per day. Ward's was one of the leading taxidermy studios in the country, and it often did work for major American museums. The establishment specialized in stuffing animals and mounting skeletons, and Carl was placed in the taxidermy section. He soon tired of his work and was about to quit when news came that Jumbo, P. T. Barnum's famous elephant, had been killed by a speeding freight train in Canada. Barnum chose the Rochester studio to stuff the skin and mount the shattered bones. Akeley was charged with the task, and he did a brilliant job.

  Shortly thereafter, Akeley took a job at the Field Museum in Chicago, where he worked for many years. He began collecting and mounting animals for the Field, and gradually he perfected a revolutionary new method of taxidermy (more on this later). In 1905 he mounted an impressive pair of elephants for the Field, and the American Museum sent him to Africa in 1909 to get a bigger and better group for New York.

  Such collecting was not without its hazards. While Akeley was stalking an old bull elephant on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, the elephant unexpectedly charged him. Akeley's gun jammed, and in a matter of seconds the old bull was on top of him. Akeley, having mentally rehearsed just such an emergency, grabbed each tusk in his hands and swung down on the ground between them. The elephant sank his tusks into the earth, pressed his curled up trunk against Akeley's chest, and then whipped the trunk across his face, slicing open Akeley's cheek and breaking his nose. Akeley lost consciousness as the elephant continued to drive its tusks into the earth. (Had the tusks not struck an underground obstruction, Akeley would have been crushed.) The Africans fled from Akeley, thinking he was dead, and he lay unconscious for four or five hours. He finally revived, and spent three months in the bush (there was no nearby hospital) recuperating from punctured lungs and broken ribs. (On another occasion Akeley was attacked by a leopard, which he killed barehanded.)

  During this long period, Akeley started thinking about the rapid changes he had seen since his first trip to Africa. The game was disappearing as civilization spread increasingly to the hinterlands, bringing with it farms and cattle. The cry was raised that the wildlife of Africa must make way for agriculture. Akeley realized that the Africa he had come to know would not last much longer. While brooding over this question, he conceived an idea.

  Upon his recovery and return from Africa with the elephants, Akeley proposed his idea to the Museum. He wanted to preserve Africa in its unspoiled state in a great Hall of Africa at the American Museum of Natural History. The hall would include examples of African mammals in their original habitats, and no expense would be spared to make the exhibits achieve a realism that was beyond anything ever done before. Akeley told a friend of his, "Everything that has been done in the American Museum of Natural History in the way of African exhibits must be thrown out and completely discarded; we must start over again."

  The idea of the habitat group—the showing of animals and plants in their native habitat against a realistically painted background—had originated at the Museum around ten years earlier. The concept was first tried out with the Museum's Hall of North American Birds, which drew tremendous popular acclaim. By 1909 the techniques of duplicating plants, flowers, rocks, trees, and backgrounds had been perfected. Akeley, however, wanted to take the habitat group a step further. Some habitat groups still appeared static and unreal, even though they were technically almost perfect. Akeley wanted to create habitat groups on a huge scale, and he wanted them to be bursting with vitality and spontaneity, to be esthetically beautiful as well as scientifically accurate. In short, he wanted his habitat groups to be works of art. For Akeley, this meant going back to Africa and starting from scratch—from collecting the animals and plants to photographing the landscapes and hiring and training new artists.

  The Museum needed little persuasion. Akeley impressed the Museum with the need for the hall and the short time left to create it. The Museum began making plans to start work on the hall in 1914. All the collecting plans, however, were interrupted by World War I, and Akeley spent the war sketching plans and sculpting scale models.

  Museum President Osborn put Akeley in charge of raising money for the African expeditions to collect for the new hall. Before raising money, Akeley felt he had first to return to Africa himself to crystallize many of the ideas he had been turning over in his head. So in 1921, Akeley went to Africa accompanied by a wealthy couple, the Bradleys, who wanted to hunt exotic animals. They hired Akeley as a "white hunter," with the understanding that the Museum got first choice of any animals they shot. On this trip, Akeley penetrated the high rain forest of the Belgian Congo for the first time and was captivated by its surreal beauty. In fact, he was so impressed by the area that he eventually persuaded King Albert of Belgium to declare a large section of the Kivu a national park and gorilla sanctuary—thereby helping to save the rare mountain gorilla from extinction.

  This small area encompasses remarkable ecological extremes. The Kivu volcanoes rise from a sweltering lava plain where temperatures reach 120 degrees. At a higher altitude the flora becomes first a bushy scrub and then a thick bamboo forest. The higher slopes of the Kivu are covered with true jungle, although the weather resembles northern England more than equatorial Africa. Due to the high altitude, the volcanic slopes are soaked daily with cold rains and bone-chilling fog; hailstorms and nightly frosts are common. Higher up, the rain forest gives way to dwarf trees and subalpine conditions. Finally, at the summit, the volcanic craters themselves are barren and usually covered with snow.

  Here, shy mountain gorillas live in a narrow band along the steep—almost vertical—mountain slopes, in the upper regions of the bamboo and the lower regions of the rain forest. On the 1921 safari, Akeley and Bradley shot several gorillas in this area—enough for Akeley's planned gorilla group in the hall. (On one hunt, Akeley had to lash himself and his dead gorilla to a tree in order to skin it on the steep slope.) During this trip, Akeley also took the first motion-picture footage of a gorilla in its native habitat.

  It seems strange to us today that Akeley would find no contradiction in shooting rare animals for inclusion in a hall, whose purpose was to preserve African wildlife for future generations. In truth, Akeley saw hundreds of rare animals being slaughtered by professional hunters and their wealthy clients. In addition, thousands of square miles of wilderness were being cleared and fenced for farmland and grazing. What could be wrong, he reasoned, with taking a few more for the noble purpose of the Museum's African Hall, which would preserve the Africa he loved for future generations? Akeley himself, however, took little joy in killing, and on several occasions was unable to bring himself to shoot an animal he needed for a habitat group.

  After his return from the 1921 safari, Akeley realized he needed to raise large sums of money if his hall was to be done properly. A wealthy friend, Daniel Pomeroy, suggested that George Eastman (of the Eastman-Kodak Company) might be able to help. Akeley seized upon the suggestion with such enthusiasm that Pomeroy was taken aback. He asked Akeley—somewhat nervously—how much he was going to ask Eastman to contribute. Akeley replied, "I'd like to see Mr. Eastman give us a million dollars." Pomeroy was horrified and tried to "tone Carl down," but Akeley was too excited.

  On the night train to Rochester, Akeley kept Pomeroy up all night talking about the hall. "African Hall," Pomeroy later wrote, "had grown as important to him as life itself." As Pomeroy tried to sleep, Akeley remained in his seat, puffing furiously on his old corncob pipe. Periodically
he burst out, "By heaven, Dan! If Mr. Eastman only can see how important, how necessary this is—" And then he would break off, too excited to continue.

  When they met Eastman the next day, Akeley launched into a heated description of the hall. He told Eastman that he had a chance to create the "greatest exhibit in the world." "Even though I warned him," Pomeroy wrote, "about killing the goose that laid the golden egg, he could not refrain from naming a high figure." Without letting Eastman catch his breath, Akeley asked him point-blank for a million dollars.

  The rotund, genial Eastman nearly fell out of his chair. But Akeley's enthusiasm had done the job, and Eastman promised an initial gift of $100,000, which would cover the cost of three or four dioramas.*17 Pomeroy himself chipped in $25,000, and others followed suit. Each contributor of a diorama got, in turn, the chance to hunt for that particular group in the upcoming expedition, under the guidance of Akeley and other Museum explorers, and to have their names engraved in the hall. It was an attractive deal for anyone with a loose $25,000, and it allowed the Museum to control exactly how many and what animals were shot. The expedition was named the Eastman-Pomeroy-Akeley African Expedition.†18