Like most kids I
loved dinosaurs. I really loved
dinosaurs though. I had every dinosaur
book you could find. I had the entire
collection of Aurora model
dinosaurs, (although they ran the gamut from early reptiles to dinosaurs to
mammoths and cavemen) and I still have them packed away in my back room. I had a deal with my parents that if I saved
half the money for a model they would match the other half. I knew the price of every single one and
whenever I had half the money for the next one I would pester and pester until
we went to the store and I got it.
One time when I
was around six, I saw a set of little plastic dinosaurs and prehistoric animals
I wanted. I remember it came in a box
like a little cardboard suitcase, complete with handle to carry it around. The day came when my mother took me to the
store to get it. I don’t remember the
name of the store, but everything was on display or in a catalog and you wrote
the number of the item on a slip of paper and handed it in. You then went to the back of the store and
waited by a counter. Behind the counter
was a conveyor belt where the stuff you ordered eventually came through a
curtain of plastic strips from the warehouse.
It was like waiting for your luggage at the airport. It finally came out and when I got home I
opened it and discovered that it contained two Dimetrodons and no Saber Tooth
Tiger (Smilodon, know-nothing toy company!).
I was inconsolable. My mother
told me in no uncertain terms that we were not going back to exchange it,
temper tantrum or not. I think that
might be the moment my innocence died and my cynicism took hold, not to mention
my OCD.
Speaking of OCD, I was intent on the correct
pronunciation of each dinosaur. I would keep a list of any dinosaurs that I
wasn’t sure of the names for the next time I had to go to the doctor. Once my mother had pointed out that doctors
knew Latin and could tell me the proper way to say the dinosaur’s names she
never had to drag me there again. I had
to wait until the end of my checkup to ask him to read off the names and I
would say them over and over in my head so I would always remember. The trickiest one was a pterosaur named
Rhamphorhynchus. I still have a database
in my head of hundreds of dinosaur and prehistoric animal genus and species
names. If I ever get on a quiz show and
the category “dinosaur names” comes up, watch out! Otherwise it is basically useless knowledge
if you’re not a paleontologist.
Speaking of
which, when I was about eight I got a Dr. Seuss book called “My Book About Me”,
which a child fills in all the information about themselves. On the page where you have to fill in what
you want to be when you grow up I wrote “paleontologist or shopkeeper”. Two very dissimilar fields, I know,
especially when you consider that by shopkeeper I meant grocery check out
person at the local Grand Union! For
some reason, if I couldn’t be out in the field discovering some new dinosaur
species or unraveling the mystery of ancient life I would be just as satisfied
punching numbers in a cash register at a supermarket.
When my family
moved to Texas in the mid
seventies I was thrilled to find out that there was a manmade lake in town and
you could find fossils in the banks when the water level was low. Could you ever! My father would take me down there and I would
pluck all kinds of ancient marine life right out of the dirt. There were all kinds of ammonites, ancient
mollusks, blastoids, cephalopods, so many amazing fossils there for the
taking. No one around there really
thought anything of it, they were that common.
Then there were
the dinosaurs. My family took a ride to
Glen Rose, to Texas to Dinosaur
Valley State Park Paluxy River Texas
state dinosaur, but then it was found that it might just be the same as the Maryland
state dinosaur called Astrodon, meaning there was no such thing as a
Pleurocoelus. Then some of the prints
and bones were found to come from a new species named Paluxysaurus, after the river they
were found in. So they changed the state dinosaur to Paluxysaurus, which might
have been pointless because now it is believed that Paluxysaurus is just a
Sauroposeidon, meaning it doesn’t exist either.
Dinosaurs are very confusing. I
probably know more names that aren’t dinosaurs any more than names that
actually are at this point!
My father worked
on a construction site in Glen Rose, building a nuclear power plant and they
would come across fossils all the time.
Whenever they did the job would shut down while scientists would study
or remove the fossil, or at least decide if it was important enough to try to
preserve. Of course the workers hated
when it happened because it meant no work and no pay until the fossil was
removed. My father told me about one day
when they blew up some rock and there was a huge almost complete pterosaur skeleton
in the cliff face. The foreman discussed
it for a bit and decided to just blow it up so the job could continue. My father was sick about it, as was I when he
told me.
One night my
mother and father took me for a ride, and we ended up at the jobsite. My father took us to a building full of
equipment, and in the back of the building he pulled a tarp off of a three foot
square cube of rock. They had found a
perfect footprint from a therapod dinosaur which they all said was
Tyrannosaurus, but was actually an Acrocanthosaurus,(amateurs!) the other
dinosaur that left tracks in the Paluxy
River
We left Texas
and moved to Pennsylvania in the
late seventies. We bought a house in
Coopersburg right at the time that a dinosaur trackbed was discovered in town. It was kind of a big deal, not just to me but
to everyone. The first day at the house
I jumped on my bike and rode up there.
Jim Turner was the geologist that first found the tracks, and he was on
site that day. He was impressed with the
ridiculous amount of dinosaur knowledge a fourteen year old possessed and he
let me work on the site cleaning footprints along with the scientists or grad
students, or whoever they were. People
were showing up constantly to gawk, so he had me giving tours and explaining
the prints and the types of dinosaurs that made them to the crowds. As you could imagine I was in my glory!
For the record,
the tracks dated from the late Triassic period, around 220 million years
ago. They were earlier dinosaurs, not
like the huge ones people are more familiar with. The ones that stand out in my memory are
Coelophysis and Grallator, both fairly small bipedal meat eaters and
Phytosaurus, a crocodile-like reptile.
One day as I was
leaving the site I found a rock outside the fence near the highway that had a
fern fossil imprinted in it. I carried
it back to Jim and he took it and that was the last I heard about it. Very soon after that interest waned and for
whatever reason the site was closed. I
was bummed out about not being able to be a junior paleontologist anymore, but
life went on.
A month later, I
was reading the new issue of a science magazine called Omni. There was a section every month called
“continuum” which focused on new science blurbs and stories. There was a picture of my fern fossil with a
little written piece about how it was found in Coopersburg and it was
previously unknown in that area and strata.
It mentioned Jim’s name, but not mine.
That’s how it goes in the world of academia, I guess.
About twelve
years later thieves came in and cut the tracks out with concrete saws and no
one knows where they ended up. I was
very sad to hear about it because I always hoped someday someone would purchase
the land and make it into a museum or attraction. The ironic thing is that the tracks weren’t
really worth all that much monetarily, especially not when cut up and removed
from the site. The value was scientific,
in that they were complete trackways of several different species all alongside
and crossing over each other.
That’s where my
interesting (some may disagree with that description!) dinosaur stories
end. I have maintained my love for
anything prehistoric, but I have moved on from just dinosaurs.
In the years
since I have become more fascinated by earlier life, the Paleozoic era with the
Cambrian explosion and the abundance and variety of life that followed. I have a dream of one day going to the
Burgess Shale, but who knows if I’ll ever get there.
I have a fairly
decent fossil collection, some of which are probably fakes, like the many that
dominate the fossil market these days.
You can find fossils being sold everywhere, on ebay, in fossil shops and
flea markets, but there are so many fakes out there. There’s big money in fossils now, so the
whole market is corrupt. If you see
anything that comes from Morocco ,
chances are it’s not real and you should stay away from it. If someone is selling you any decent size
fossil for $40.00 or so it is a scam.
The fakes look very good these days; some experts even have trouble
telling them apart from the real ones.
I have a very
small trilobite fossil that I had mounted on a silver necklace that I have worn
every day for over 20 years now. I feel
naked without it and it’s a geeky conversation starter, but I get a tiny thrill
out of knowing that I’m wearing something left behind from an animal that lived
500 million years ago.
Some times I feel
a twinge of regret that I didn’t go to college, didn’t try my hardest to become
a paleontologist like I wanted. I have
more interest now in physics and astronomy than in my old friends the
dinosaurs, but I still like to read what I can about them.
One day a few
years back, I was in the grocery store using the self checkout lane. As I scanned my groceries my necklace caught
my eye and I suddenly realized something.
My Book About Me, my childhood book I wrote about myself. Paleontologist or shopkeeper. Here now, checking out my own groceries with
a fossil around my neck … how many of you can say you came that close to your
childhood dream?
I knew about the Aurora models and stuff, but I had no idea what depth of paleontology wonk you were. Now you've moved from the rocks to the stars and all the particles in between. Good on you.
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