Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  For three miles we ran the gauntlet of firing from both sides of the road.... The only reason why we were not riddled with bullets is because the Chinese is the world's worst rifle shot....

  New trouble began when they finally reached the rear of the retreating army. Thinking soldiers might be protection, Andrews let three or four ride on the running board of the car. One of them fell off and his arm was caught under the wheel just as Andrews slammed on the brakes, shredding his hand. Then more soldiers wanted to ride, and over Andrews' protests they piled on the car by the dozen. Inevitably, one soldier fell off and broke his leg. His enraged comrades cocked their rifles and were about to summarily execute Andrews and his companions when an officer arrived just in time to save them.*23

  The Russians and Buriats proved to be just as bureaucratic and dangerous as the Chinese.†24 On the 1925 expedition, the Russians decided that Andrews was engaged in a spying mission. In Urga (now called Ulan Bator), the capital of Outer Mongolia, one poor security agent ran himself ragged on foot trying to keep up with their motor cars. Andrews finally took pity on the man, inviting him to ride in his car. The Mongolian government insisted on assigning two Buriat security agents to accompany the expedition itself, Dalai Badmajapoff and John Dimschikoff. Dimschikoff, hoping to please his superiors, reported that Andrews was plotting with the American and British governments to annex Outer Mongolia. The other agent turned out to be a decent fellow and heartily contradicted Dimschikoffs reports, thereby saving the expedition from certain arrest. The Soviet government subsequently exiled Dimschikoff to Siberia for his fabricated reports; he was later "rehabilitated" and sent to Germany with Badmajapoff, where he reportedly robbed and murdered his companion.

  The worsening political situation and rising antiforeign feeling in China finally forced Andrews to cancel the 1926 and 1927 expeditions. But Andrews had made up his mind that whatever happened, he was going to make one last try to get into Mongolia in 1928. By the spring of 1928, however, conditions on the Mongolian plateau had become very bad. Bandits swarmed over the area in such numbers that everyone who could be robbed had been, and the bandits themselves were starving from lack of booty. Finally the Chinese government made a truce with the bandits, allowing them to extract specified amounts of "protection money" from traders—five dollars per camel and $100 per car—provided it was done in a consistent and orderly fashion, with no loss of life. The expedition could only get into Inner Mongolia, where they explored a remote area in the northwest.

  At the end of the 1928 expedition, the Chinese authorities at Kalgan seized their collections. A group called the Society for the Preservation of Cultural Objects accused the expedition of having "stolen China's priceless treasures" (among them, of course, the dinosaur eggs) and of being "spies against the government" and of "searching for oil and minerals and smuggling opium." Andrews spent six weeks negotiating with the Chinese authorities to get his crates of fossils back. In 1929 the same society required a list of onerous demands before it would authorize the expedition. Negotiations broke down, and Andrews reluctantly canceled plans for the 1929 expedition.

  But Andrews persisted. In 1930, he finally came to an agreement with the society. Once again, the expedition set out to explore in Mongolia. They made outstanding fossil discoveries, especially of large mammals; among their finds was an entire graveyard of rare, shovel-tusked mastodons, previously known only from a few bones. On this trip they had their closest call with bandits, when three Chinese attacked a lone expedition member. The man drove the bandits away by shooting one in the face and killing another's horse.

  The 1930 expedition was to be the last. It had now become too difficult and dangerous to continue scientific work in Mongolia. Although the expedition had been an outstanding success, it was a great blow to Andrews that they had not discovered the Missing Link. He was still convinced that it was out there, buried somewhere in the Gobi, the paleontological Garden of Eden.

  NINE

  The Thirties and Beyond

  The Central Asiatic Expedition did, in a sense, turn out to be Andrews' swan song in exploration. He returned to great fanfare and popular acclaim, and four years later the Director of the Museum was asked to resign and Andrews took his place. Like other outstanding explorers, Andrews turned out to be a mediocre administrator.

  Andrews' real accomplishments, though, live on in the Museum. Every fossil hall in the Museum is packed with his finds, and ten thousand more specimens remain in drawers and on shelves in the Vertebrate Paleontology section, still studied diligently by scientists from around the world.

  The end of the Central Asiatic Expedition, 1930, also marked the end of the golden age of expeditions. It was the end of an era at the Museum in other ways as well. The immediate cause of the change was the Depression, but profound changes were taking place in the way the Museum—and similar institutions—conducted research and promoted exploration.

  The Depression hit the Museum and its wealthy trustees badly. In 1933, Osborn retired from the Museum, frustrated by the chronic shortage of funds and the elimination of the grand projects he so desired. The Museum's endowments, one-half of which were in railroad bonds, took a plunge when many railroads defaulted. The trustees, who had traditionally made up the deficit at the end of the year by "passing the hat," found themselves dealing with their own financial problems.

  F. Trubee Davison succeeded Osborn as President. A kindly man, Davison was not, however, a scientist and took only a casual interest in the Museum. At his request the trustees made the Director the chief operating officer of the Museum, leaving the President with overall responsibility but no administrative or scientific duties.

  During the thirties the Museum cut salaries, curtailed publications, and eliminated staff positions. In 1932 the use of Museum funds for fieldwork and expeditions was banned entirely. Andrews became Director in 1934 at a low point in the Museum's history, and he proved incapable of handling what would have been a difficult job for anyone. According to Clark Wissler, a curator in the Museum's anthropology department during the Depression years, the Museum was infected with an "atmosphere of pessimism and defeat." Without a strong President or an effective Director, the Museum continued to slide downhill.

  In 1941 the trustees finally took action and hired Alexander Ruthven, president of the University of Michigan and a systematic zoologist, to make a study of the Museum and its ills. After several visits and six months of poking around the Museum, Ruthven issued the recommendations he had hitherto kept secret, despite friendly requests from several nervous Museum officials. They were not complicated, and they boiled down to one major change—get rid of Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was asked to resign, which he did with not a little bitterness. He lived the rest of his life in California, writing numerous books about his experiences at the Museum. He died in Carmel in 1960.

  Andrews was replaced as Director by Albert E. Parr, who managed to pull the Museum out of its doldrums. The world had changed during the Museum's dark years, and it emerged a different kind of institution. The need for grand expeditions had passed. With that passage went the large-scale support from wealthy individuals, who liked to associate themselves with grand projects. Large, coordinated expeditions with supply caravans and native bearers were simply unnecessary—a curator could board an airplane and be anywhere in the world in a few days or a week. Little logistical support was needed. Efficient transportation and communications had taken all the glamour out of expeditions.

  In addition, many of the curators who had lived under Andrews' directorship felt resentful of his style, his thirst for headline-grabbing discoveries. Some felt (probably unfairly) that he was a careerist who used the Museum for the advancement of his own fame. A consequence of this was that the Museum moved away from the showier kind of fieldwork and collecting for collecting's sake; a typical expedition would later consist of one curator who had a specific research question, and who as a result would make a very limited collection.

  It
is important to note that the collecting done before 1930, while not always directly related to current research, laid the groundwork for decades, if not centuries, of future scientific work. (In Part Two we will look at some of these modem-day explorers.)

  Finally, the science of natural history itself, which had been ascendant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was being partially eclipsed by the newer sciences of cellular and molecular biology, and even medicine. In the minds of some, natural history, taxonomy, and evolutionary research seemed a little old-fashioned, a science in which most of the important questions had been solved.*25

  With the dramatic expeditions having ended, and the science of natural history sharing a more crowded stage, the Museum did lose national visibility. But today, its research and exhibition programs are stronger than ever before. The revolution in the theory of evolution—the so-called punctuated equilibrium theory—was born at the Museum, and today more than two hundred scientists and their assistants carryon research in all fields of evolution, zoology, animal behavior, and mineral science. As we will see later, the collections made before 1930 continue to support research programs in many disciplines, from planetology and systematic zoology to crystallography and evolution. The research that is being done today at the Museum is a synthesis of all that has gone before—all the collecting, storage, and expeditions, all the people who contributed in some way to the growth of the Museum—and has set the stage for the revolution in evolutionary studies and systematic zoology that has taken place over the past generation, much of which was and is centered at the Museum. We will take a brief look at some of this research in Part Two.

  MOUNTAIN OF THE MISTS

  Today, in a matter of forty-eight hours, a Museum scientist can get to almost any spot on the globe. No longer are huge supply caravans of camels needed, and no longer is it necessary to cut through miles of deep jungle or to traverse half a continent of ice and snow with dogsleds and Eskimo guides. Today, the real challenge isn't getting there, but obtaining the necessary funding, permits, and visas to go there (and, once there, sometimes dealing with military bureaucrats or unstable revolutionary governments). There has been one exception to this rule: a place called Cerro de la Neblina, "Mountain of the Mists." An expedition there in 1984 and 1985 hearkened back in many ways to the age of Roy Chapman Andrews.

  The northern section of the Amazon watershed—2,000 miles upriver from the sea—drains off a scattering of isolated tabletop mountains that rise sharply above the tropical rain forests. Called tepuis, these are the eroded remains of a vast plateau that covered the area hundreds of millions of years ago. One such tepui, straddling the border between Venezuela and Brazil, is the "Mountain of the Mists." Isolated by its sheer cliffs and deep canyons—and usually shrouded in a heavy cloud cover—Neblina floats like an island 6,000 to 9,000 feet above the jungle. Torrential rains soak the mountain and pour down its ravines, filling the blackwater swamps around its base.

  Neblina is one of the most isolated places on earth, and one of the last areas still largely unexplored by biologists. Although the trackless swamps and nearly incessant rain together create an environment that fosters a diversity of animal life, Neblina and its surrounding rain forests have always remained uninhabited by humans.

  In 1984, scientists from the Museum and a dozen other American institutions joined Venezuelan biologists and scientists from other countries in a major expedition. Its purpose: to conduct a complete biological survey of the Mountain of the Mists. Because of its extremely inaccessible location, the only way to reach Neblina and study it properly was through mounting a large expedition—not unlike the Central Asiatic Expedition of years before. This time, however, instead of camels and motorcars, the expedition used a combination of every sort of transportation, from military planes and helicopters to dugout canoes. The results of this research—thousands of animal and plant specimens—are now being intensively studied at universities, herbaria, and museums both here and in Venezuela.

  The similarities of this expedition to the Museum's earlier extravaganzas are striking. The extreme remoteness of Neblina demanded a large support team. Unlike most recent fieldwork, the Neblina expedition had no idea what they might find at the top of this isolated plateau. (They knew enough, however, not to expect live dinosaurs, as the more fanciful press has suggested might be found in such remote areas.) Like the Central Asiatic Expedition, the Neblina group included dozens of scientists from many disciplines and many institutions—including botanists, mammalogists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, entomologists, and ornithologists. And also like the Central Asiatic Expedition, it will take years—even decades—to study thoroughly the exotic plant and animal life brought back from the Mountain of the Mists. Funding for the costly expedition came from many sources, including the National Science Foundation and private donors (especially the William H. Phelps Foundation), as well as from the home institutions of the various scientists.

  "The expedition had one basic purpose," explained Jerome G. Rozen, Jr., Deputy Director of the Museum and an expedition entomologist. "We wanted to get in there and find out what was living in this largely unstudied area—to take a detailed biological inventory. The expedition is part of a larger, worldwide effort to study and understand the world's rain forests before they are destroyed by man."

  Sponsored by Venezuela's Foundation for the Development of the Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, the expedition was led by Charles Brewer, a Venezuelan who has had years of experience exploring remote jungle areas. One of the few people familiar with the Neblina region, Brewer turned out to be an ideal leader—an old-fashioned, Roy Chapman Andrews type. Lean and muscular, comfortable with half a dozen Indian languages, Brewer was most at home, according to one expedition member, "hunkered down over a campfire with a group of Indians."

  Although several decades of technological improvement have passed since the golden age of expeditions, transporting eighteen scientists and more than a ton of equipment and supplies to an area over sixty miles from any human habitation proved to be a formidable logistical problem.*26 U.S. scientists made the first leg of the journey by plane from New York to Caracas, where they were joined by their Venezuelan colleagues. From there, a small plane took them to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas, a territory in southern Venezuela. Brewer had lined up a Venezuelan army Hercules transport and charter planes to carry the scientists and their equipment to San Carlos, a tiny settlement on the northern reaches of the Rio Negro, one of the major tributaries of the Amazon.

  At San Carlos the eighteen scientists of the first team met for the final and most arduous part of their journey. They loaded all of their supplies and equipment onto three huge dugout canoes powered by outboard motors, and headed upriver to Santa Lucia, an Army post consisting of little more than a clearing sliced out of the jungle. From there they flew helicopters across fifty or sixty miles of unbroken, uninhabited swamp to their base camp at the foot of Neblina. The first part of the expedition lasted six weeks. Small parties sortied by helicopter up the sheer walls of the mountain to establish mountain camps for three-or five-day collecting forays. Armed with microscopes, specimen containers, nets, funnels, firearms, binoculars, tape recorders, preservatives, collecting jars, and the like, they amassed tens of thousands of specimens and gathered data on distribution, ecology, and behavior, as well as documenting rainfall and temperature.

  At one point a small collecting group dropped on the mountain by helicopter for a three-day stint. When the time had passed for their return and no helicopter arrived, they were concerned and started rationing food. As the days stretched on, they were forced to eat their bird specimens. (Of course, they saved the skins and skeletons for study.) "Every day, we would have a broth made out of one bouillon cube and five little birds," said Richard Zweifel, a Museum herpetologist. "Unfortunately, all you can get out of a bird is a little piece of meat the size of your pinky." They also discovered that a certain species of palm contained a
n edible heart—"a little like celery and about as filling." (The palm was a new species.) The helicopter finally arrived after nine days, the delay having been caused by mechanical problems and poor weather. Zweifel, who was built sparely to begin with, lost ten pounds.

  Members at the base camp at the bottom of Neblina also had to go on short rations because of bad weather and helicopter breakdowns. They resorted to eating such rain-forest animals as the capybara (a large rodent: "tasty, like veal"); the caiman (a crocodile: "white and fishy, something like lobster"); the curassow (a chickenlike bird that tasted, not surprisingly, like chicken); and the peccary (a wild pig: "leaner than pork").

  Although it will be years before comprehensive findings are published, major new animals and plants have already been identified and classified from the specimens brought back from Neblina. In terms of plant life alone, the results are stupendous. More than half of all the plant species found at the top of Neblina were unknown to science—and most may not exist anywhere else on earth.