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No Way Out-- Alan Grant and the Cloverly Digs
By paleeoguy
The harsh afternoon sun scorched the ground in south central Montana. There was no shade in the badlands, and no escape from the intense heat. Scrub brush, prairie grasses, and yucca and cacti dotted the hills. These were the only plants that could tolerate the intense dryness of the summer. Not much chose to reside in this part of the world. It was an oven most times; a barren, hot place. Rattlesnakes lay tucked away in their dens, resting in the shade, away from the fatal warmth. Jackrabbits stretched their bellies on the floor of their burrows, absorbing whatever cool temperatures the ground offered. The only midday activity displayed by any animal was that of a group of humans.
They were located in a pit in a steep hillside, most of them were nearly as brown as the earth, their skins hardened and darkened by working day in and day out under the sun for weeks. At times they would talk amongst each other, wishing for iced tea, describing what their homes were like, friends, family… pets. Despite the group being together for so long and working so close there were often times when no voice came from the hillside at all. Sometimes the only sounds were a random breeze slipping through the canyons, the occasional passing of a high altitude jet, and the constant thumping and clinking of hammers, chisels, and picks.
Often it was too warm to speak, and no one wanted to waste the energy. Then, there just was no conversation, just hammering, sweating, and grunting…getting through to lunch when they would retire from the quarry and slouch in the shade of a sandstone washout. Then they would take off their hats to feel the breeze cool their foreheads. Granted, they might have ended up with a mouth full of dirt or dust if they began to speak, but the real reason was because when anyone started talking, it usually ended up being either two things: talk about the heat, or talk about the food, good food that they did not have. These conversations were much like that of old men on a decrepit sun porch, fanning themselves and telling everyone how many Cadillacs they would buy with a million dollars. Fun and fancy free.
The people were a small paleontological camp. Work is mostly what they did, and there was not much for glamour among them. Things like mirrors, makeup, and combs were pointless. Showers came one or less times a week, so a periodic swim in a nearby river helped keep the odors down. They had important things like deodorant, toothpaste, and toilet paper, and water. It was the bare essentials, because they did not have the time, energy or space to waste on luxuries like air conditioned trailers, or portable fans. They were in the middle of nowhere in the badlands, and considering bringing such things would have someone seriously considered for a psychological examination.
There was no plumbing or refrigeration. Electricity came in two forms: battery and generator. The generator was only used for powering a pneumatic drill to drive through over burden at the dig. Batteries did not get any larger than D-sized, powering lights, radios and alarm clocks. Such was the life of a paleontologist. Grit, blisters, bruises and the clothes on their back.
Some of the diggers lacked even the clothes. A few of the men took off their shirts to appease the fledging vanity in their minds with the hopes of tanning their skin to attract young coeds at summers end. Who would be able to resist a tanned, chiseled form? Chiseled literally, though. More than once a day someone would murmur or groan after a hammer missed its mark and landed squarely on a finger or knuckle. Bruises. Even the most experienced of the people occasionally hammered their hands, but they did not yelp as much. Blisters. By days end most everyone’s hands yielded a map of routine activities: cuts from tripping, blisters from shoveling, bruises from hammering. It was not an elegant job, but the rewards were great.
The Museum of the Rockies had sporadically been sending people out to the badlands in south central Montana since the early 1980’s. Ever since John Ostrom’s discovery of the mid-cretaceous raptor Deinonychus antirrhopus in the mid 1960’s there had been a raised paleontological interest in the area. When Alan Grant took over the position of Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, he shifted the museums’ focus from the Judith River miasaura beds to the famous “Shrine” area badlands in an attempt to recover more Deinonychus specimens. The museum’s board of directors questioned this move, but Grant assured them there was a large area of mid-cretaceous exposure in the south central part of the state that had not been thoroughly researched yet and that it had potential to yield more ‘raptor fossils and possibly new animal and plant species. He proposed a three year research project and obtained a grant from the National Science Foundation and solicited donations from various private sources.
Grant assembled a team of senior scientists to broaden the horizon of research in the area, and to appease the temperaments of the board members. He acquired Jim Hurt, the best non-vertebrate paleontologist he knew who was also a good friend; a budding paleobotanist, Ellie Sattler, who was recommended by Hurt; a geologist to study the sedimentary stratigraphy and take sections of the formation, Bob Shoupe, and a taphonomy specialist, Kari Brouwer. Those had been the permanent envoys of the project, with the occasional arrival and departure of specialists who studied things ranging from mammals, reptiles and amphibians at micro-sites, to iguanadontids, ankylosaurs, and various theropods of the era.
These other dinosaurs were fine for sampling the local diversity and ecology, but Grant was interested in the raptors. Deinonychus had been one of the crucial elements in pushing the dinosaurs from the lethargic, strictly cold-blooded category, to the realm of bird-related, possibly warm-blooded and agile creatures. He wanted as many dromaeosaurid-related sites as possible.
***
Grant’s early work with the Denver Museum of Natural History allowed exposure to various mid and late Jurassic sites of the Midwest Como Bluff and the newly established Dinosaur National Monument. He did not mind working with the large allosaurids, but the damned sauropods were too much. One disarticulated brachiosaur rib he had excavated as a favor was nine feet long around the curve. There were some museums in the United States and in the world that still had not opened sauropod jackets from the mid-fifties! For Grant, that was too much dinosaur. Let the people in Utah take care of those, he often thought.
But the Denver museum was fond of the Jurassic era dinosaurs that were so common in the area, and Grant was being pulled in other directions. He ultimately found himself out on the east coast for a personal visit with the Smithsonian’s curator of non-vertebrate paleontology, his friend Jim Hurt. The two had met by chance while scouring the Hell Creek badlands in eastern Montana some years before.
Grant had received some time off from the Denver museum one summer, and decided to go to Montana and visit the Hell Creek badlands, where Barnum Brown had discovered the type specimen for Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902. Grant had never really been too interested in T-rex. Other children crowded around and swooned about T-rex at all the natural history museums he had gone to as a child. He was sick of the crowds and the kids. He wanted his own dinosaur. His favorite had been Triceratops horridus, the late cretaceous, three-horned, tank behemoth. As a child, Grant always had Triceratops himself. No other children, no one else; just Alan and the Trike.
While in Hell Creek, Grant had hoped to come across some Triceratops remains at so that maybe he could get the museum to pursue something of some interest to him. Hell, even a Tyrannosaur would have been nice. At least they were smaller than those damned Brachiosaurs.
One afternoon while stopping on a tree-covered hilltop, Grant had relaxed a little too much in the shade of the fir trees and fell fast asleep. He woke to something shaking his shoulder, and in his drowsy stupor he at first believed a cougar or a coyote was attacking him. After a startled yelp, and much to his relief, Grant found himself in the company of another paleoscientist…Jim Hurt. They became fast friends, and ended up prospecting together until Jim left later in the week.
And so, Grant was visiting Hurt at the Smithsonian when the question was posed to Alan of how things were in Denver. Grant looked around the dark, cluttered storage room they were in, studying the simple gray cabinets and cluttered table tops.
“Well I’m happy to have a job, Jim.” he had said. “But in all honesty it’s a highly specialized museum with the capabilities to expand it research, but it just isn’t doing it.”
Jim looked at Grant. He was a lanky man, a few years older and a few inches taller than grant. He had wavy red-brown hair and a handlebar mustache.
“Well, Alan, take it or leave it. You can’t stay there forever. It sounds like you’ll go nuts!” Jim joked, “You’ll find yourself in the backwash of the paleontological community. You’ll stagnate and years from now you’ll find yourself a life sciences teacher at a local high school…in Denver! You have to find an outlet for yourself. Your life depends on it. I know, I‘ve presented lectures to high school kids. They‘re vicious.”
Alan laughed.
“Jim, your enthusiasm is marvelous.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, but I don’t want you to worry about me. I’ll be fine. Something will come up for me soon enough. I don’t know what it will be, and I don’t when, but it will happen.”
Jim relaxed and looked his friend squarely in the eyes.
“You know, Grant?” he sighed. “You’re right. And when you get your chance, come hell or high water, those poor bastards you call ‘peers’ had better watch out. We’ll be doomed with your coming.”
Grant smiled and looked at across the room.
“Well, don’t get my hopes up. I might make a name for myself..”
“Ah, that wonderful, backboned sarcasm. How do you vertebrate people find the energy to stand up straight? How about some lunch?” He began to walk out of the room.
“See? Good things are happening already: you’re buying me lunch!” Grant said as he caught up.
Jim stopped by the door, “Right.”
The two men laughed and left the room.
*
They sat at a small sandwich shop a few blocks from the Museum. The shop was fairly unremarkable to Grant, white walls with green trim on the molding and a green stripe running midway all around the dining area. But it was good food, and Alan was hungry.
Jim reminisced their first meeting between bites of turkey and roast beef. He was laughing and bits of food were jumping out of his mouth. Alan slid his sandwich back a little.
“I remember,” Jim chuckled, “that I was hiking around Nowhere, Hell Creek, USA, when I stumbled upon this young guy who fell asleep under some fir trees.” He paused, looking out the window as if it was a window looking to that day. “You were fast asleep under this big conifer tree, and I saw that a storm was coming, so I started shaking your shoulder, and-” Jim snickered, more sandwich popping from his mouth, “when you opened your eyes, you screamed!”
Grant raised his eyebrows.
“Well with a face like yours,” Grant smiled, “how could you blame me?”
Hurt’s bushy eyebrows raised.
“Oh, I am crushed,” he smiled.
He raised his hands and looked up.
“Yeah, well some of us don’t expect to be awakened by anything in the middle of nowhere in the badlands in one of the largest states in the country five miles from the nearest road,” Grant entertained Jim with a smile. “Anything but a mountain lion or a coyote. So you can hardly blame me.” Alan took a drink of the beer he had on the table. Briefly, he wondered if any of Jim’s sandwich had ended up inside.
*
They finished their lunch and walked out of the sandwich shop, crossed the street and walked the three blocks to the museum. They stopped at the base of the steps and Alan turned to Jim.
“Well, Jim, it’s been a helluva time.”
“Yes it has, Mr. Grant. You never get to stay long enough.”
“Well I’m a busy man, I have to find something to occupy my time otherwise I’d be visiting the east coast and bothering you every chance I got. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay longer, but I have to be back in Denver the day after tomorrow, and I want to spend a day in Jersey checking out some of Cope’s collection.”
“I understand. But its damn good to have you here.” Jim looked at his friend. “Take care of yourself, Alan.”
They shook hands as they had done on an afternoon once before, halfway across the country, several years ago. As Grant turned to go, Jim posed a final question.
“Hey, Alan?”
Turning, Grant said, “Yes?”
“Why not check out Marsh’s stuff at Yale? You’ve never been there.”
Grant paused.
“No, I haven’t. But a lot of Marsh’s stuff is from Como, and I can see as much Como or Morrison shit as I want back in Denver.”
“Well, yeah, but you might run into Ostrom while you’re there. It would give you a chance to talk to him about his dromaeosaurs.”
Grant’s wore an intense expression on his face. His thought focused: Ostrom’s dromaeosaurids…his raptors from south central Montana.”
“Yeah…” Grant paused, intrigued.
“Jim, you know what? I think I will pay Yale a visit. Thanks!”
“Anytime, my friend, anytime.” Jim looked rather pleased. With that, Hunt turned away and jogged up the stairs into the Smithsonian.
Alan Grant adjusted his belt and walked down the sidewalk to hail a cab. He ended up at Yale University the next day, admiring the skull of the smartest looking dinosaur he had ever seen.
Dromaeosaurs were Grants life force after that day. They were his inspiration, and his motivation. Not soon after his meeting with Jim, the position of Curator of Vertebrate paleontology opened up at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. There were dozens of applicants, and Grant beat them all out. His interview was one of the earlier ones, but the board told him “ you should pack your bags” anyway, and that’s just what he did. As soon as Grant returned home, he poured himself a glass of bourbon, toasted Denver’s board of directors goodbye and began packing the things in his small house. One week later MOR called and Grant left Denver’s Museum of Natural History for good. Now, Grant would be in control of what he wanted, and he wanted raptors. He was out to prove people wrong about dinosaur intelligence, behavior, and lineage. He firmly believed that dromaeosaurs were directly related to birds, and were possibly the most intelligent of all dinosaurs.
***
Before starting in Montana, Grant had considered an expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. He was interested in the raptors of the Flaming Cliffs, but at the time he couldn’t gather the funding to support the kind of expedition he wanted. Velociraptors finds were also sketchy and too risky to bet an entire expedition on. Grant also did not enjoy the thought of flying overseas.
Grant decided on the Cloverly formation of South Central Montana. He hired John Barry as his crew chief, and since he would be directing at least half of what the teams would be doing, John arranged the dig equipment.
His teams were working the badlands of south central Montana. Grant was looking for the dromaeosaurid Deinonychus and its contemporaries. To start the project, he had people comb the hills like ants on honey, and they were finding things everyday. However, ‘raptors were not in the group as often. There were plenty of tenontosaurs, but good ‘raptors were proving rare.
Much of his workforce was volunteer based. People wrote the museum, inquiring about dig opportunities. He usually had grad students sort through the e mail, and he and John worked through the letters. He tried to read as much as he could, and when he was not reviewing CAT scans of skulls or prepping fossils in the lab, or teaching a class, Grant read letters.
He looked for people with experience, mostly. Occasionally, he would take on a high school student or two, and the occasional tourist, but Grant wanted work done and did not have the time to train novices. He kept the crew fairly large for this project. There were usually around thirty people at the camp, many volunteers, less grad students and even fewer scientists. The volunteers did the grunt work, but Grant was not above that himself.
Initially, Grant spent most of his time prospecting the hills in search of Deinonychus. He found the first site the second week of June. He sent John out with a crew to extract the fossil. Disappointingly, it had not been more than some backbones, part of a foot and bits of leg and tail. But at least it was a ‘raptor, and it appeared to be larger than Ostrom’s 1964 specimens, which had been sub adult. It took nearly three more weeks before Grant found any traces of another raptor, and he found it in one of the most despicable places possible.
The afternoon that Grant found the raptor, he had been hiking a tree-laden ridge that circled around a deep gorge. Looking down into the valley, he noticed a thick band of exposed sandstone that traced around the walls of the coulee. He found his way down easy enough, and began following the sandstone layer around the gulch. About half way around the exposure he spotted a smooth, coffee-colored bone. It was sticking out of the sandstone at about waist level, and right away Grant knew he had found his dinosaur. He found it hard to believe at first. He took his hat off and set it on a nearby lump of stone. Removing his field pack, he set it on the ground by he feet. He crouched and fished out a scratch awl, some glue, and carefully scratched the bone out of the steep hillside. It was not difficult, the sandstone almost melted away with his touch. In seconds, Grant found himself looking at a beautifully preserved Deinonychus toe digit. It was large, too. He applied some of the glue to the bone in order to strengthen it, and packed his tools while it dried.
Grant reached into his pack again and produced a topographical map and marked the site’s locality. What to name it, he thought. He looked around, thinking what he could possibly call this site. He looked up. Above him was a steep, hillside. Grant was surrounded by sheer sandstone cliffs. He suddenly realized there was twenty five feet of rock between him and his carnivorous fossil. How did he get into here?, he thought. He wrote No Way Out on his map. That was a good name for the site, seeing as it would take some time for him to find a way out of the area. Two hours later he did.
Grant hiked back to his pickup, and arrived at base camp soon after. He pulled the tarsus out of his pocket and showed John. At first, John smiled. The smile faded as soon as Grant mentioned the 25 feet of overburden. John put his head in his hands and moaned.
Two days later John had a crew working the dromaeosaur’s tomb. Grant was not above quarrying, but he needed to find more sites. He frequented the area to check on progress, though. After about two weeks the crew made it down to the bone horizon. Grant then personally aided in the excavation. He did not want anything to happen to the skeleton.
To be continued…
4/15/2004 6:14:00 PM
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