All Gone to Look for America (18 page)

There’s also a yellow ribbon behind the counter in The Stockman, which has a sign above it proclaiming this to be Montana’s largest bar. The other sign puzzles me, however: the one that proclaims, ‘Where the pavement ends and the West begins’, until I realise that by ‘pavement’ they mean ‘tarmac’ – paved road, further emphasising the need for the missing dictionary. The Stockman has a large central floor space permanently cleared for the live country music
played at weekends. Right now, on what I would still term an early Wednesday evening but seems already to be night in Montana it is deserted save for half a dozen men in baseball or cowboy hats. A sign above the bar says: ‘Even a fish stays out of trouble if he keeps his mouth shut.’ This seems good advice.

Despite the ludicrous pictures of fat John Prescott posing in an outfit given to him by a rich American businessman, there’s something about cowboy hats worn
in situ
by men whose heads seem to fit them that makes me believe they might just possibly be packing a fully-functioning six-gun as well. I have to remember: this is America. Even back in relatively suburban Niagara Falls the casino asked customers not to bring firearms into the gaming rooms, reflecting the fact that they might actually be carrying them.

The local motel bar closes at 9:30 p.m. banishing even the men in cowboy hats to their rooms. I wander out into the street and try my luck in The Mint Bar and Casino – casino here meaning simply the presence of
dollar-swallowing
poker machines. Inside is a long bar with a long line of men in baseball caps drinking Bud Light from bottles while the seemingly never-ending ball game plays on a flat screen behind the bar.

I ask for a draught beer and get an insipid, pale and tasteless Bud Light. Seeing nobody looking much like conversation among the line of individuals necking bottles along the bar, I let the poker machine – is this becoming a
dangerous
addiction? – swallow three dollar bills in succession, and then decide to call it a night, wandering back out into temperatures that have now dropped to a decidedly chilly minus 2 C.

On the way back I notice only one of the local police cars is still outside the field station. Mulder and Scully have packed up for the night. The truth is out there. All I have to do is wake up and smell the coffee. I had no idea it would be in the company of an evangelist Texan in a Stetson.

THE MAN WAITING
for me over breakfast in the diner of the Great
Northern
Motel the next morning looks like Indiana Jones’s eccentric grandfather. There are people whose larger-than-life reputations precede them, but often in the flesh fail to live up to expectations. Professor Robert ‘Bob’ Bakker is unquestionably not one of them.

He sets the tone of the day straight away by making a joke about my unkempt frizzy hairstyle. This is a bit forthright, but I’m sort of used to it. It’s just a bit bizarre coming from a man with round John Lennon glasses, an unruly long white beard and a mane of greying hair swept back into a disorderly ponytail protruding from underneath a giant white cowboy hat. And then I spot the twinkle in his eyes. Bakker is sending out a challenge. I can tell we’re going to get on like a house on fire. It’s a question of who can take the heat longest.

Renowned as a polymath, eccentric and one of the great eminences of American palaeontology, Bob Bakker is one of the most quirky, inspiring, intelligent and eloquent companions anyone could have for an excursion into the wilderness of Montana.

He asks what I want for breakfast and while I study the menu trying to make out what the locals would have, he orders for me: coffee and bacon in an English muffin. It’s a bit of a cliché, but grand, really. He probably has no idea how hard it is to get English muffins in England: the word nowadays routinely summons up what my mother would have called a fruit bun i.e. an American muffin. Bakker meanwhile reinforces his eccentricity by ordering his own
particular
start to the day: French toast and cold water.

Straight off, despite the prim embarrassment of my lady hosts at the museum yesterday, Bakker wastes no time in enlightening me to the real story behind the mysterious goings-on in the lab the day before. He had been in there with them, and obviously enjoying himself. Unfortunately not Mulder and
Scully as such but nonetheless a substantial detachment of local county, state and federal police finding their way around among bones that were
considerably
older than those they might normally have come across in detective work.

The criminal they were on the track of had been employed at the field station several months earlier. He was a felon okay, but not quite run of the mill: a rogue palaeontologist who had turned ‘to the dark side’ transforming his scientific calling into a nice little earner by pilfering bone specimens. It seems ‘bad form’ to me but hardly on a scale with grand larceny or art forgery. Which only goes to show how little I know; Bakker wastes no time in telling me. In fact, it seems, corruption in the arcane world of palaeontology has a lot in common with both. For example, a really good, rare bone specimen, could on the black market – I’d not until now really thought of there being a black market in dinosaur bones – be worth between $200,000 and $300,000.

Worse, the suspect was also believed to have been tinkering with
classification
to make a random piece of bone seem more interesting than it really was. In other words, by falsifying the background of where it was found – almost exactly like an artist forging a more famous signature on a painting – and then leaving it in place for several years, he could effectively authenticate its phoney provenance, thus boosting its value when it mysteriously disappeared to
resurface
on the black market. I was impressed. If the truth really was out there, it didn’t stop someone tampering with it to make a quick buck.

For most of yesterday Bakker was going over boxes full of old bones, some still pending classification, trying to spot things that were obviously out of place. And, more importantly, things that might have gone missing. But now the ‘feds’ and their lesser accomplices have bagged their evidence – he’s
understandably
not going to tell me what he fingered – and moved on. ‘We’ll see,’ he murmurs with that same twinkle in his eye, now directed towards Sue, his fellow palaeontologist who has joined us. ‘We’ll see.’

Meanwhile I’m going to see inside my first ever dinosaur field station. And I can’t hide a certain frisson. I’ve been up close to dinosaur bones before, of course. Who hasn’t? I still remember my first childhood visit to London’s Natural History Museum with its giant reconstructed diplodocus. But this is not just another plaster-cast dinosaur skeleton; this is the real thing. This is where they lived. These are the guys who dig them up. If they ever do get round to cloning them one day, it’ll be somewhere like here they come to get the raw material. And you can’t have watched
Jurassic Park
and tell me that’s not cool.

But who – or possibly what – I want to know is/was Judith River. ‘Eh?’ goes Bakker. ‘Oh. It’s a river.’ I look around, at the endless empty vista of rolling
scrubland extending in every direction beyond the rusty grain elevator and the low-rise buildings of Malta. ‘No, not here,’ says Bakker, almost with irritation. ‘Miles away, to the south.’

I look even more perplexed and Bakker heaves a sigh, realising at last that he is dealing with some sort of paleontological moron. Which I could have told him, if he’d asked.

‘This – not this,’ he waves a hand at the surrounding sparse scenery, ‘but where the bones are found, is the Judith River Formation.’

‘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.
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