All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  ‘It’s strata of land exposed down to the level of the Judith,’ Sue steps in gently to explain, ‘rock from the Cretaceous Period.’ And then adds helpfully, although not in any real geological sense but because she has a better grasp of her audience, ‘Just after the Jurassic?’

  I nod at last. Just before asking, ‘And Judith?’

  ‘Ah,’ says Bakker, beaming as he turns round to but in. ‘Judith was the girlfriend of Meriwether Lewis. You have heard of Lewis and Clark?’

  I smile sweetly.

  ‘Well, she was the gal Lewis left behind, back in Virginia. Of course, after he got back she deserted him, which may have been one of the reasons he killed himself, but there you go!’

  There we go indeed. For the next 10 minutes Bakker is suddenly rapt, like so many westerners by choice (he was born in New Jersey, but these days mostly lives in Texas), in that great story of adventure. It was Lewis and Clark, he tells me, who on Jefferson’s orders collected the first large number of fossil specimens, even though they had no idea what they were, given that even the concept of prehistoric lizards was alien to men in an age when few suspected the world was more than a few thousand years old and all the work of an omnipotent God. This could lead us onto the recent revival of creationism and the concept of ‘intelligent design’ refuting evolution. Interestingly, for the moment Bakker chooses to skirt it.

  ‘It was mostly clams and squid. In fact most palaeontology still is mostly clams and squid. And turtles. The history of life on earth is written in clams and turtles and squid,’ he explains.

  ‘Take Stonesfield slate for example, from Oxfordshire.’ I turn to look him in the eye in astonishment. This is one of those coincidences you don’t quite expect. Here I am in the middle of Montana and a venerable palaeontologist dressed in cowboy kit has just brought up the scarce traditional Cotswold roofing material that back home I am having immense difficulty sourcing for a small extension to my house.

  ‘Well,’ he booms, ‘if you get ’em, take a good look at ’em. Just full of clams and squid. It was the Rev. Buckland back in 1822 who first identified them.’

  ‘Take a look at this,’ he says, opening the door to the field station and leading us in to a wide open-plan room – still reminiscent of its past as a tyre warehouse – filled with giant bones and what appear to be freshly dissected dinosaur body parts dominated by a hulking, apparently life-size reconstruction of a creature that looks disconcertingly like the unfortunate offspring of a match between a triceratops and George Lucas’s gormless Jar Jar Binks.

  For the moment, however, it is not the duck-billed dinosaur that Bakker is drawing my attention to, but a set of ancient black-and-white photographs on the wall: pictures of men with whiskers and dusty black suits and cowboy hats standing with horse-drawn carts next to dinosaur skeletons. His favourite is the improbably named Quaker minister Edward Drinker Cope: ‘He came out in 1876, at the height of the Indian wars but just after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, because he reckoned the Indians would have other stuff to bother about.’

  According to Bakker, whom I am beginning to suspect sneakingly sees himself in the tradition of these ancient pioneer palaeontologists – in every sense of both words – Cope was largely right. But he did have at least one potentially dangerous spot of Indian trouble. It happened in a quiet moment when Cope was sitting in a clearing and had chosen the moment to take out his top dental plate which had been troubling him to give it a polish. It was then that he spotted a fully-armed Nez Percé brave staring at him from the trees. Cope sat there transfixed for a moment until he realised that the Indian was trying to tell him something; after a moment he realised he wanted him to put his teeth back in and take them out again. This he duly did, reducing the Indian brave to hysterical laughter, only to be joined imminently by up to a dozen other braves who all started hilariously trying to see if they could take their own teeth in and out like the white man.

  When Cope died he thoughtfully donated his body to the University of Philadelphia, a gift so appreciated by his successor fellow palaeontologists that, according to Bakker, ‘A couple of years ago we took his skull on a posthumous sabbatical visiting every major dig site in the country.’ At least nobody could say they weren’t experienced in looking after old bones.

  By now however, I can no longer keep my attention away from the remarkable reconstruction hanging from the roof, nor indeed the fossilised remains beneath him.

  ‘Meet Leonardo,’ says Sue, with all the enthusiastic pride of a western schoolma’am introducing her prize pupil. It’s not so much the reconstruction she’s proud of, though, as the original. Leonardo, she explains, is a 77-million-year-old brachylophosaurus, who just happens to be the most intact and well-preserved mummified dinosaur fossil in the world.

  You don’t often see a woman get quite as excited as Sue Frary about the contents of a 77-million-year-old dinosaur’s lower intestine. But that may be simply because you don’t often come across anybody, including most palaeontologists, who’s ever seen them.

  Back in 2002 a team of field researchers from the field station uncovered a find that remains one of the most remarkable prehistoric discoveries ever: the fossilised, mummified remains of a young adult brachylophosaurus.

  Before you turn to your Palaeontology for Dummies handbook or point out that a brachylophosaurus is a bit obscure compared to those family favourites, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, brontosaurus (the long-necked ones) or even triceratops (the spiky-backed jobs whose rubber effigies are particularly beloved as a prodding weapon by toddlers), Sue is the first to admit that a ‘brachy’, despite being 22 feet (seven metres) long and weighing up to two tonnes, would be a bit dull in movie-makers’ terms.

  They weren’t voracious man-eaters – not least because there were never any human beings contemporary with dinosaurs despite the most contorted creationist theories or Hollywood wishful thinking. Nor, as my description above implies, were they particularly cuddly, not even when rendered in rubber and reduced to manageable dimensions.

  ‘Nope,’ says Sue, ‘in fact they were rather gangly, with long arms in relation to the rest of their body.’ They were also strict vegetarians, living off the plants that grew along the shores of the huge inland ocean that once covered the central United States.

  She points to a map on the wall, one of those maps that just draw you in: a map of North America that shows the continent divided into three great chunks: one an isolated chunk of north central Canada, the second a great slab of land from the east coast to the Midwest and then, separated by a great seaway stretching all the way from the Arctic Circle to what is now the Gulf of Mexico, the vast, land-fringed spine of the Rockies reaching down towards the Andes. ‘This is what America looked like in the Cretaceous,’ says Sue, matter-of-factly.

  ‘With vegetarian dinosaurs foraging up the coast, and the meat-eaters following along after them, you could say this whole area was like a dinosaur highway.’ In other words, a lot busier than it is today.

  What is so special about the one particular brachylophosaurus that Sue and Bob Bakker are obsessed with is the condition he was found in: fossilised whole rather than just a set of bones. This means that eventually not just the contents of his stomach and intestines will be analysed but also whole organs, the first time human beings will have had any real first-hand knowledge – rather than just guesswork – about non-skeletal dinosaur physiology. The discovery of Leonardo in 2002 was a milestone in palaeontology because he is the first, mummified dinosaur to be discovered since the early twentieth century when techniques for investigating or preserving them were far more primitive.

  In fact, Leonardo is the most important dinosaur find in the last hundred years. Since then, another mummy – of a hadrosaur – has been unearthed in Dakota. But Leonardo remains special. His name, though, Sue admits, has nothing to do with Da Vinci but with two young lovers who scrawled their names on nearby rocks in the middle of the First World War: ‘Leonard Webb and Geneva Jordan 1917’. The
‘o’ – ‘just sort of got added’.

  Already Leonardo has been subjected to high intensity X-ray – which required the whole building to be evacuated ‘and probably left every man in north Montana infertile’ quips Bakker – by a team of Kodak specialists who flew in specially. Once the scientists have worked out the complicated logistics of moving him without vibration – ‘he’s mostly just sandstone, for heaven’s sake,’ explains Sue – the plans are to take him to Utah for a maximum CAT scan carried out at an Air Force utility more accustomed to analysing the innards of missile systems.1

  What is most remarkable about his state of preservation is that indentations in the outer layer of sandstone clearly represent actual scales – about the size of an adult’s little fingernail – covering his skin in the tail region. If the CAT scan works out as imagined, they might – just might – be able to discover what colour he was. Our conventional representation of most dinosaurs as green comes simply from the fact that we tend to think of most modern reptiles as green; the latter isn’t actually true, so the former certainly isn’t either:

  ‘He might have been muddy brown. Or even yellow.’

  Bob, she tells me quietly, to spare his blushes, was one of the first to oppose the old, once commonly-held perception of dinosaurs as sluggish, cold-blooded creatures, and suggest they might have been fast-moving bird-like animals. Where would Steven Spielberg have been without him? In fact, I later learn, Bob was a key adviser in the making of Jurassic Park. Spielberg was so taken with Dr Robert T. Bakker that the bearded palaeontologist Dr Robert Burke was deliberately intended as an affectionate reference. Even if he did get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus. Come to think of it, Bakker might think that one hell of a way to go!

  ‘Old Leonardo here was probably got by a meat-eater who then got distracted. What we’re doing is reconstructing the circumstances of his death.’

  ‘Sort of like CSI Montana, 70,000,000 BC,’ I suggest.

  ‘Yep, he’s a vic!’

  She points out thin lines and dots made as if with a fine chisel in the sandstone of the fossilised mummy: ‘We’ve identified at least 20 types of fossilised pollens, in the upper stomach and intestines alone. A lot of conifers and magnolia. It’s like having a diary of his last few days. We’ve also been able to find out more about his beak; it was made of keratin, pretty much like human fingernails.’

  But what I want to know is how exactly they identify and then excavate a potential fossil site. Sue makes it sound remarkably simple, if perhaps a slightly more violent procedure than I had anticipated:

  ‘First somebody finds a significant bone: part of a hip or something sticking out of the rock maybe part way down an escarpment. Then we try to identify it, dig a bit more round it, and then when we’re convinced there’s something there, they use dynamite – controlled – to blow off the top of the rock, then bulldozers to lower what’s left. Then we map out roughly where we think the main bones are and start digging.’

  At first they use pickaxes and shovels to break up and remove the rock and soil but then as the find begins to emerge, revert to tiny, woodworking-style awls, poking into the surrounding material and brushing away the debris, a long, slow, painstaking process, often augmented by enthusiastic amateurs in scheduled summer digs. Eventually, if a substantial skeleton emerges, they start to coat it in protective cloth and then cover that with plaster. After the top is covered, they begin to dig below until the skeleton rests on a sort of pedestal of the rock from which it has emerged, while the dig team starts the same protective process of applying cloths and plaster from below.

  ‘You actually have to get in there and hold the plaster until it dries.’ And finally when almost all of the skeleton has been excavated and covered, they ‘flip it over, hoping that no bones get displaced’, before hoisting it up with a crane onto a flat-bed truck for removal to the lab, in this case the field station.

  ‘Hey,’ says Bob Bakker, as if the idea just occurred to him. ‘Maybe you’d like to ride on out to take a look at some of the sites.’ My jaw drops – like that of a detached brachylophosaurus – and Bakker smiles, and disappears into an office to make a phone call. ‘Just calling the Hammonds to clear it with them. It’s their land,’ he explains and then ushers us out with a, ‘Let’s all hop into Jack’s rig.’ And there he is standing outside with his big red truck and his guns in the back: good ol’ Jack Millar is ready to take us dino-hunting.

  It’s about 10 miles out of town before we roll up off the tarmac onto the rough gravel ranch road, the big Dodge 4x4 rasping stones in a spray behind us as we bump along and then head off abruptly towards the edge of an abyss. Just before we reach it, Jack hits the brake and we come to a halt, breathless on the shore of a primeval sea. It takes Bob Bakker to make me see it. At first glance it looks like a brown and ochre moonscape, an endless canyon-like rocky plain to which rough scrub grass clings like stubble on a pockmarked face. Totally silent, with low cloud drifting in wisps below us. Surreal and savagely, primordially beautiful. To think this was once the tropical, lushly-foliaged shore of an ocean. In the distance there are tiny dark brown dots. Moving. I lift my camera and zoom in to find they are cattle, a dozen maybe at most, wandering separately from each other, picking their way across the mostly barren landscape, nibbling at whatever they can find. If they made a sound we are too far away to hear it. Now I realise why Mike, the rancher on the train, said you need at least 10,000 acres to scrape a living out here.

  And then Bob is reaching out his arm pointing out the stratifications in the layers of rock that fall away beneath us. ‘Come on,’ he says, beckoning me to follow him as he bounds down the tufted rocky slope. ‘You shouldn’t just imagine it filled up with water,’ says Bob as I scrabble after him. ‘There’s been all sorts of erosion, glaciers levelling off, smoothing down, landslips.’ But by and large where the flat plains drop away Bob points out the easily distinguishable bands in the rock: ‘That’s bear paw,’ he says, pointing out the thick dark, lower layers, named for the geology of the Bear Paw Mountains further west, Sue would later explain. ‘All of that would have been near the bottom of the sea, and there, where it gets lighter, that’s Judith River.’ I know enough now to understand he doesn’t mean the river itself, but a stratum of rock from the specific geological formation.

  He takes me further, down steep slopes of soft clay-like soil and sand covered with tiny prickly cacti and clumps of the aromatic pale green sage that grows like a weed everywhere and makes up much of the scrub. ‘Take a handful of that and stick it up your nose. Wonderful.’ And it is. Before long, Bakker is scrabbling in the soil: ‘Here, look at this, that’s a bone,’ and he hands me a tiny shard of red-yellow striated material that on inspection I have to agree does indeed look like an ancient bone. A few minutes later, he’s found another one, larger this time. ‘Here,’ he says, pulling out something about the size of a big toe and rubbing the yellow-grey soil off it. ‘That’s another bone. You can have that one.’ I look at him doubtfully for a moment, with memories of the black-and-white police cars and the feds going through the field stations’s specimen boxes. And he shakes his head, and kicks at the soil and unearths a couple of small fossils which he bends down to examine: ‘Squid, what did I tell you. Turtles and squid.’ I realise that this is a man who knows – and would never jeopardise – anything remotely resembling a major find, who also knows that the land we are walking over is rich in the biological debris of a lost world, that is nowhere near as lost as most people imagine.

  All of a sudden he surprises me by coming out with an unexpectedly cultured English accent, and then I burst into laughter as I realise Bob Bakker is doing an uncannily accurate impersonation of David Attenborough. He enjoys the BBC. Bakker the polymath is something of a fan of certain aspects of British culture – as indeed he is for aspects of Russian and Mongolian culture. He’s excavated dinosaur specimens out there too. ‘Ulaan Bataar’s a great place, but it stinks,’ he says in a sudden moment of heartfelt humanity. ‘The
y’re storing up a legacy of lung cancer and heart disease in all those coal-fired power stations they use. They can’t even think 10 years into the future.’

  His enthusiasms extend to the Michael Caine film Zulu about the siege of Rorke’s Drift in South Africa, and the history of the event itself: ‘Imagine 29 Welsh engineers singing “Men of Harlech” in the face of 6,000 Zulu warriors, as well as such quintessentially British institutions as Spike Milligan and The Goon Show.’ Here I am on a crisp, cool sunny day staring out over thousands of square miles of vanished prehistoric ocean awash with dinosaur fossils next to a long-haired bearded man in a cowboy hat singing ‘I’m walking backwards for Christmas across the Irish Sea.’ Milligan would have loved it.

  But Bob Bakker is not a fan of all things British. He has no time, for example, for Oxford University’s celebrated Richard Dawkins, the biology professor tasked with popularising science and undoubtedly the country’s most famous atheist: ‘He’s a loudmouth and an idiot. They use him to hammer God.’

  Bakker is no atheist, in perhaps the same way that Einstein would never refute God. He collects religious concepts like he collects evidence of prehistoric life, claiming a mixed history of ‘Presbyterianism, the Church of England and Orthodox Judaism’. Which is quite a brew. But then Bakker belongs to that relatively widely represented school of science that disagrees with creationism chiefly because of the insistence on taking holy books literally rather than as offering metaphorical explanations.

  ‘St Augustine collected fossils,’ he says, picking one up from the earth and tracing the lines of some long-dead invertebrate in the sandstone. ‘He was working on a way of explaining the stages of the creation, not in actual days but in eras. St Augustine was a very clever man,’ he adds, in a way you know he means Richard Dawkins is not.

  Bakker is working on a book dealing with a synthesis of Biblical Christian and Jewish theology, Darwinism and palaeontology. He does not see those concepts as contradicting one another in even the remotest terms. In his world view, intelligent people can see correlations between religion and science rather than the stark opposition he believes exists primarily in the limited imagination of fundamentalists on both sides. He would like to think his book will help rebuff the ‘ridiculous’ claims of creationists who purport to believe the earth is only 4,237 years old: ‘Y’know that’s a modern idea, not been around that long at all: the churches were amongst the earliest supporters of science.’