Chapter Twelve
NOTHING ABOUT THE CREATURE MADE SENSE.
In a laboratory high above the American Museum’s exhibition halls, Lull directed a team of preparators as they cut open the plaster jacket holding the bones of the newly-discovered dinosaur and began chipping and chiseling at stone that seemed unnaturally strong. Mice scurried under their feet as days passed without noticeable progress. Still they worked on, taking care not to let their impatience get the better of them. In the field, the work of a paleontologist was all action, locked in a battle with the elements to free a specimen from the earth before it crumbled; in the laboratory, the work was painful and slow, a monastic discipline that required delicacy above all. A collector had to trust that another dinosaur fossil always lay around the bend; a preparator never forgot how close they were to disaster. Every action was a hypothesis put to an instant test. One wrong choice—pressing too hard, sanding too closely, brushing too vigorously—and a bone more than 60 million years old could be shattered, destroying priceless evidence of Earth’s history that might never be found again. Once all traces of rock and dust were finally cleared from a section of bone, it was coated in layers of shellac to prevent it from crumbling. Work then turned to the next segment, rebuilding the puzzle of life piece by painful piece.
Over the course of two years, Brown’s discovery began to take shape. Osborn watched as the creature’s jaws, vertebrae, ribs, shoulder and pelvic bones emerged from a bed of rock, all the while imagining how they fit into a living, breathing animal. The questions the specimen posed came faster than any answers. First among them, why did an immense creature have such strangely small and seemingly useless forelimbs? Nothing as diminutive had been found in the fossil record among carnivorous dinosaurs, nor in any of their prey. Osborn stretched for an evolutionary explanation, eventually landing on the idea that perhaps the two-fingered arms were used for “grasping during copulation.”
Thinking about how exactly dinosaurs had sex was not out of the ordinary. The question remains a pressing line of inquiry in paleontology today, given that a dinosaur’s sexual anatomy would indicate how closely it resembled modern-day birds—which pass semen through the cloaca—or whether it was more reptilian in nature and had a penis, like modern-day crocodiles and alligators. Regardless of anatomy, the act of mating would seem to pose a challenge given the need to navigate long and bulky tails and, in species such as Stegosaurus, the presence of spikes that would suggest a risk of injury or castration. As recently as 2013, one computer-assisted model suggested that the only way to solve the problem would be for a female Stegosaurus to lie on her side, though no one knows how long her partner’s penis or cloaca could stretch, because soft tissue rarely fossilizes.
Still, Osborn had his doubts that the needs of mating were sufficient to explain the diminished anatomy of Brown’s new discovery. While the size of the forelimbs “abundantly characterizes this animal . . . in the writer’s opinion final judgment must be suspended until the skeleton is fully worked out,” he wrote when formally describing the specimen. In a small footnote below a sketch of the full skeleton, he made it even more plain. “The [positioning] of the small forearm is probably incorrect,” he wrote. The forelimbs were not the only puzzling aspect of the beast’s bones. Upon inspecting them, Osborn realized that its hind limbs were hollow, like those of a bird. With this, the creature became the most prominent example of how prehistoric life blurred the lines of the animal kingdom.
Some forty years before Brown’s discovery, workers at a limestone quarry in Solnhofen, Germany, unearthed a nearly complete fossil marked by clear impressions of spread wings and tail feathers etched in the stone. Its anatomy suggested two creatures at once: the feathers and the air sacs in its backbone indicated a prehistoric bird, while the body—including developed teeth, a long tail and three clawed fingers capable of independent movement, unlike the fused fingers of living birds—pointed toward a reptile. (Some who examined the specimen, which cast a beautiful white outline against the yellow tint of rock, argued for a third option: fossilized angel.) A local natural history professor determined in 1861 that it was a reptile. The British Museum of Natural History soon purchased the find, and Richard Owen decided to reclassify it as a bird with the name Archaeopteryx macrura—all but ignoring the evidence that the specimen was just the sort of transitional fossil between two species that Darwin had theorized in the Origin of Species but had yet to be found in the fossil record. Owen was widely derided by his fellow English naturalists, who were disinclined to like him anyway, with one contemporary writing in a snide letter to a friend that the specimen was “a much more astounding creature than has entered into the conception of the describer.” Not to be outdone, Darwin wondered, “Has God demented Owen, as a punishment for his crimes, that he should overlook such a point?”
Darwin cited the fossil—which became known as the “London specimen”—in subsequent editions of his landmark book as an example of his contention that life does not have fixed categories. “Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than this, how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world,” he wrote. At roughly 160 million years old, Archaeopteryx is now considered one of the earliest known birds. Studies of its DNA show that it was covered in jet-black feathers, like a raven. Nor was it alone in its likely coexistence with dinosaurs; in 2005, paleontologists in Antarctica discovered a 68-million-year-old creature, known as Vegavis iaai, which looked remarkably like a modern duck, suggesting that other birds were there in some form all along. Vegavis iaai most likely quacked like a duck, too, given that it is the oldest known example of an animal with a vocal organ called a syrinx, which allows modern birds to make their distinctive sounds. No dinosaur fossils with a similar structure have yet to be uncovered, suggesting that, though many of them were likely feathered, dinosaurs did not sing.
A small animal that combined features of reptiles and birds was one thing; a massive carnivorous dinosaur with architecture similar to that of a creature capable of flight was quite another. As he studied the specimen in front of him, Osborn slowly began to realize that its importance lay beyond its shocking size. It was a scientific marvel in every sense, unlocking a door to the distant Earth that had been closed for 60 million years. Never before had such a large predator been found, much less conceived of. Its existence implied a complex ecosystem far removed from the land of fat, lazy giants that Owen had imagined. Gigantic herbivores were well known at this point, signaling the existence of a lush prehistoric environment that provided enough plant life to sustain them. A carnivore of the same size, on the other hand, suggested that animal life must have been more plentiful and dense than previously imagined. Otherwise, how could a predator of such an enormous size find enough food to survive? And if life was more plentiful, that implied at least some form of social structure, suggesting that dinosaurs could have been capable of moving in herds, like land-bound flocks of birds.
The questions posed by Brown’s discovery came in waves. A creature this huge and ferocious had to hunt, but how? It had to roam, since otherwise it would conceivably exhaust all sources of food quickly—but how far? And if an animal like this existed, its potential prey must have developed some form of defense—but what? Nothing before had ever demonstrated the ferocity of evolution in such an obvious form; nothing else made the idea of slow but potent change so visceral. At the end of the late Jurassic period, an extinction event erased giant sauropods like the Brachiosaurus from the Earth. Some 40 million years later, life had somehow found a way to reorder itself into the monster whose bones were now spread out in a Manhattan laboratory.
Its size struck Osborn for other reasons as well. Throughout his career, he had a tendency to view the history of life on Earth as a sort of morality tale in which good prevailed in the end. In that light, Brown’s discovery was the perfect example of the shortcomings of physical strength: huge, brutish and extinct, an unmistakable illustration that muscle alone does not guarantee survival. Its disappearance opened up the ecological space for mammals, which were blessed with greater intelligence and the capacity to care for one another. The failure of a species with a body so powerful, and the triumph of humans with bodies so weak by comparison, seemed to Osborn evidence of a great plan, a long pageant of life that peaked with present-day Anglo-Saxon humans in their rightful position of power.
Osborn had long wanted a giant that would prove his worth; now, he had the biggest meat-eater that ever lived. By 1905, he understood enough about the animal to let the world in on the secret. The first person to publish a scientific description of a newly discovered species gets the honor of naming it, following an international convention which typically incorporates some combination of a description of its distinctive features, where the species was found or the person who found it. Stegosaurus, for instance, has its root in the Greek word for roof, inspired by Marsh’s ultimately incorrect assumption that its plates lay flat on its back as a sort of protective barrier above its body. Other well-known species were named for their distinctive horns (Triceratops), the sound they likely made when they walked (Brontosaurus, the thunder lizard) or the simple fact that they hadn’t been seen before (Allosaurus, the strange lizard). Hatcher, with his decision to name the Diplodocus specimen after Carnegie, had expanded the scope of possibilities to include patrons of museums, infusing bones many millions of years old with the power to reflect a human’s social worth.
Hatcher upstaged him once; Osborn was now in a position to return the favor. In a move that broke with convention and displayed an element of showmanship reminiscent of P. T. Barnum, Osborn announced that the species that Brown had unearthed would be named Tyrannosaurus rex, meaning tyrant lizard king. The animal was “the ne plus ultra of the evolution of the large carnivorous dinosaurs: in brief it is entitled to the royal and high-sounding group name which I have applied to it,” he wrote. The name was lyrical—its parade of r’s sounding almost like a chant before the snakelike resonance of the “ex”—and it was justified, a reflection of the creature’s outsized body and position at the top of the prehistoric food chain. But beyond the scientific reasons he could point to for bestowing on the creature such a distinctive and alluring name, it spoke to Osborn’s dreams of glory. He would forever be linked with the one species known as a king, elevating his own place in paleontology above any competitors. With this creature, his time had finally come.
Though T. rex now had a name, no one outside the museum had yet seen it. In February of that year, the American Museum unveiled a 70-foot-long Brontosaurus (now known as Apatosaurus) as the centerpiece of its new Dinosaur Hall, a combination of metal rods, screws and plumbing equipment holding the fossilized bones together in a lifelike pose. It was the first time that a fully assembled sauropod had stood on the floor of the museum. Thousands of New Yorkers came to view the giant, intent on seeing the beast worthy of a private reception hosted by J. P. Morgan a few days before. Few knew what exactly to call it, the word “dinosaur” proving to still be a stumbling block among those who had little exposure to science. “Some wanted to see the ‘dino’, others the ‘diorso’ and among other destinations were ‘the octopus’ and ‘His Nibs, Old Boney.’ The attendants saved embarrassment by announcing, before a question could be framed, ‘fourth floor to your right,’ ” noted the New York Times in a small article on the opening of the Dinosaur Hall.
The reaction of visitors once in front of the bones seemed a mirror into their own lives. One boy asked an attendant if the dinosaur would eat him. (Don’t worry, he wouldn’t eat “little fellers” like you, he was told—just plants.) A butcher calculated how many pounds of meat he could reap from the animal. A truck driver pondered aloud what kind of traction the beast’s claws gave it on a slippery road. It was as if ordinary New Yorkers stumbled upon a passage into a prehistoric world, only to find themselves there.
For many who stood in front of the Brontosaurus, it was the first time they were confronted with unmissable evidence that the world of the past did not look like the world of today. The presence of the dinosaur was like a window shade pulled open, revealing that science was not an abstract concept meant only for the privileged but something that could be as universal and understood as sunshine. The presence of working-class visitors in the museum did not sit well with everyone. A “professor with large glasses” who visited the exhibit called it “in bad taste in a place devoted to science,” the Times wrote. His companion, however, was of a different mind. “ ‘I don’t like it but I must excuse it,’ ” he said, according to the Times. “ ‘It has drawn all these people here, being a splendid bit of advertising. They are, many of them, deeply interested in things they would have never come to see. They will come again, and bring others.’ ”
Attendance rose 25 percent that year, a considerable jump for an institution nearly forty years old. Yet while the new dinosaur specimens brought in new visitors, few lingered in the hall. The bones of Jumbo, the circus elephant, remained the most popular exhibit. A few weeks after the Brontosaurus was unveiled, the usual crowds once again formed around the gem exhibits and other favorites, leaving the paleontology rooms sparse except for those who had yet to see its main attraction. Osborn, though he did not want to accept it, could not help but notice that one impressive dinosaur was simply not enough. For paleontology to be more than a season’s novelty, the museum would have to move past displays of isolated specimens and show the vast complexity of the former world, effectively turning dinosaurs from curiosities into the manifestation of a powerful idea. A mounted T. rex would provide a natural counterbalance to a huge sauropod, implying a vision of a reordered world that could not be found in any one-off display of a P. T. Barnum–type novelty.
There was a problem, however. As the preparators grew closer to finishing their work extracting the specimen from the matrix of stone, Osborn could not look past the fact that it was lacking too many key components for the museum to build a realistic display. Three years after Brown discovered the first T. rex, Osborn sent him back into the unforgiving landscape of Hell Creek on a mission to find another one. This time, however, he wasn’t alone.
✢✢✢✢
BROWN NEVER STAYED IN ONE place for long. He could be found anywhere but New York in the summers since he had uncovered the T. rex, often toiling in the sort of unforgiving places that people went out of their way to avoid. Yet every fall he would return, and over that cycle of arrival and departure he had somehow found a way to bring Marion back into his life. She became a constant for him, a stable tether to the present that was often lacking in his profession. She often ended her days teaching at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, then the city’s most prestigious public high school for science, to find Brown standing outside waiting for her. The two spent hours walking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, building a connection based on their shared love of the natural world. She pointed out the various species of birds and insects they passed, granting Brown the novel experience of learning about living creatures, rather than about those that were long dead. In Marion, Brown had for the first time found someone whose combination of intellect and humor allowed him to drop his defenses and feel comfortable, and ignore his instinct to roam. She, in turn, felt a thrilling sense of freedom when she was with him, and delighted in his distinctive mix of purpose and fun.
They decided to make it official. On February 13, 1904—one day after Brown’s thirty-first birthday—they were married at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Marion’s hometown of Oxford, New York. The day was cold and sunny. While waiting before the ceremony, Marion wore bright red socks over her white satin slippers to keep her feet warm. She had already started walking down the aisle on her father’s arm when she realized she still had them on. “With a muffled giggle and two vigorous kicks, she got rid of them just in time. Not that Barnum would have cared if she appeared at the altar in red socks,” their daughter, Frances, later wrote. “Many friends of both the bride and groom often spoke later of Marion’s blonde, almost ethereal beauty as a shaft of sunlight through a stained-glass window struck her happy face.”
For their honeymoon, they spent five months in the field prospecting, finally knitting together the two sides of Brown’s life. In Marion, Indiana, they inspected a nearly complete mammoth skeleton found by local amateur collectors. From there, they headed for the badlands of South Dakota, where Marion kept detailed notes of the local birds while Barnum searched for a plesiosaur, a type of long-necked marine reptile. It was her first taste of the frontier, so different from the cultured confines of home. Like Brown, she delighted in the humor of everyday life and latched on to the unintentional comedy that came from mixing scientists focused on prehistoric wonders with ranchers whose only experience in the world was survival. One afternoon, Brown and a field assistant explained to a local rancher that they were searching for the bones of a mosasaur, a predatory marine reptile that could reach up to 50 feet long. The rancher calmly replied, “Yes, I see one of them darned things swimming down in Hat Creek the first year I was here,” Marion wrote in an unpublished memoir of their trip she called Log Book of the Bug Hunters.
Marion quickly proved that she belonged. One night, the expedition camped near a stream fed by meltwater, filled with speckled trout. Marion improvised a hook from a safety pin and baited it with grasshoppers. She “caught several messes of good-sized beauties,” Brown later recalled. “They were a welcome change from canned food.” Over the following weeks, they braved every extreme the West had to offer: “high pinnacles, cathedral spires, and fortresses of fantastic shapes”; temperatures which climbed to 105 degrees; hailstorms accompanied by more than four inches of rain within an hour; and vast swarms of mosquitoes “too numerous to mention,” Marion noted. Like Brown, she never let the obstacles of nature block her attempts to understand the world around her. While he worked to excavate a duckbill skeleton near the Judith River, she took detailed notes while watching a toad give birth to thirteen babies. “The old toad never paid the slightest attention to them after they were born,” she wrote.
They took a circular route across the country. In Colorado, they rode the railway to the top of Pike’s Peak. In New Mexico, Marion studied the techniques with which Navajo women wove patterned woolen blankets while Brown searched nearby rock outcrops, eventually discovering a new specimen of hadrosaur now known as Kritosaurus navajovius, which is currently on display in the American Museum. From there, they traveled to Arizona and then to Arkansas, becoming more alike with every passing day. One night in camp, Brown spied a copperhead snake poised to strike Marion. He whispered to her to remain perfectly still while he took out his revolver and killed it with one shot. “Decades later, Barnum remarked that Marion’s instinctive reaction to his unexplained command was an example of the perfect rapport between them,” their daughter later wrote. On a swing back through Arizona, they camped on the edge of a thousand-foot cliff high above the Grand Canyon. When they returned to New York a month later, Marion set up a small tank in her classroom and plopped a horned toad she’d found in Arizona inside, a living souvenir of their journey.
The following summer, Osborn directed Brown to return to Montana and search for another T. rex to complement the specimen now nearing completion in the museum’s laboratory. He urged Brown to concentrate on acquiring enough material for a display mount, rather than filling up the museum with the bones of other, less important animals. “Every portion of [a T. rex] will be valuable,” he wrote. Brown readily accepted the assignment. When he left for Montana that summer, Marion was once again at his side, having proven her ability to handle the field over their long honeymoon the year before. Brown left the arrangement unspoken, neglecting to bring it to Osborn’s attention yet taking no pains to hide it. For him, Marion had become another part of himself, as inseparable from his body as his nose.
The expedition returned to the quarry near Jordan, Montana, in 1905. In the three years since Brown’s discovery of the T. rex, what was once a dangerous and isolated place had become a regular stop on the summer prospecting circuit. Brown arrived back in Jordan to learn that a crew from the Carnegie Museum had swept through a few weeks before without finding any worthy specimens, though they had respected the custom among collectors and left his previous quarry alone. Local ranchers, meanwhile, were now aware that the bones that Brown and the scientists from the East Coast spent so much time looking for must be valuable, and grew hesitant to let paleontologists explore their land without a contract that would give them an ownership stake in any discoveries. According to federal law, any fossil found on private land is the property of the landowner, while specimens found on public land are the property of the U.S. government. Thanks to dinosaurs, the purposeless violence found in Jordan had evolved into the mania of a gold rush, a mixture equal parts desperation and greed. One family, known as the Sensibas, offered to sell a specimen Brown identified as a hadrosaur, which they had found on their land, for $8,000, or roughly $250,000 in today’s money. Brown, who knew a farmer’s bluff when he saw it from a childhood watching his father sell coal, cautioned Osborn to limit any contact with the Sensibas so as not to make the museum appear anxious and become a mark for others attempting to unload bones at inflated prices.
No one but Brown had ever found a T. rex, leaving open the question of whether it was a feat that could be repeated. Hoping that his luck would not run out, Brown led the expedition team back to his previous spot in the badlands. He soon located the quarry and began the process of reopening it, blasting away at the rocks he had used to seal it and building new earthworks to support further excavation. He found something almost immediately. Less than six feet away from the location of the specimen he had discovered in 1902, he uncovered a T. rex skull that when pulled from the stone weighed more than eight hundred pounds. The job of fully extracting it, however, proved to be one of the greatest physical challenges Brown ever faced. The job “will take at least three weeks with powder and horse power for it is a solid sand bank,” he wrote to Osborn, adding a request for a half dozen short, heavy chisels of the “best steel.” One block of stone containing bones from the specimen weighed 4,150 pounds and required six horses to pull it out of the quarry. Round after round of blasting and scraping expanded the pit to 100 feet long, 20 feet deep and 15 feet wide, by far the biggest that Brown ever made. “This is a heavy piece of work but [Tyrannosaurus] bones are so rare that it is worth the work,” he wrote to Osborn in late July.
As he dug deeper, Brown kept careful note of the rock layers he unveiled. Near the end of the season he felt confident enough to share with Osborn a theory that he had been formulating for several seasons. “I am fully convinced after several years of work that the [coal-bearing] beds are separate and distinct from the [dinosaur-bearing beds]. I have yet to find a dinosaur bone in the [coal-bearing beds],” he wrote. Over the next two years he continued to refine his thoughts and eventually published one of the rare scientific articles of which he was the main author. In the paper, he described the features of what are now known as the Hell Creek and Tullock formations. Over time, the rock layers that caught Brown’s eye would be found to have high levels of iridium, an extremely dense metal that is rare on Earth but unusually abundant on asteroids and comets. The presence of such material from a likely interstellar source is now seen as powerful evidence for the theory that a large asteroid or comet played a key role in the extinction of dinosaurs by drastically altering the Earth’s climate.
In early August, Osborn surprised Brown with word that he planned to travel to Jordan to oversee the last stages of the dig, his impatience getting the better of him. Only then did Brown confess that Marion had been at his side the whole summer. “Mrs. Brown did accompany me from my home to camp and had done the cooking for the outfit this summer reducing our living expenses about half,” Brown wrote, hoping to appeal to Osborn’s sense of thrift. “I did not discuss the matter with you for it seemed a purely personal matter with me as long as I performed my duty without any added expense on her account and the Museum has certainly been the gainer.”
Osborn ultimately did not venture out to Montana that summer and made no mention of Marion’s presence on the expedition team. Perhaps in another summer, or with another collector, he would have. Yet the relationship between the two men had changed. Brown had proven himself at the time of Osborn’s greatest need, and, should he ever tire of Osborn’s ways like other collectors had before him, he now had the distinction of having discovered the world’s most fearsome carnivore—a résumé item that would be sure to draw the attention of the Carnegie or any other institution that wanted to rival the American Museum. For the first time in his career, Osborn was forced to treat Brown with a light touch, granting him deference that nothing in Brown’s background or social class would otherwise merit. Though his profile had risen with the jump in the museum’s attendance following the opening of the Brontosaurus exhibit and his association with the T. rex, Osborn had not yet climbed as high as he hoped. He still needed Brown—and his ability to find impressive specimens—as a bridge to becoming the king he envisioned himself to be.
The world’s most famous dinosaur at the time was far from his hands. In 1902, King Edward VII visited Andrew Carnegie in his castle in Scotland and, upon seeing a sketch of the skeleton of a Diplodocus hanging on the wall, asked what it could possibly be. “The hugest quadruped that ever walked the Earth, a namesake of mine,” Carnegie replied. Unfamiliar with the difficulty of finding a complete set of fossils, the king asked if Carnegie had a similar specimen that he could spare. Carnegie offered a plaster copy, and in early 1905 thirty-six boxes containing 292 replica bones arrived in London.
Four months later, two hundred men and women crowded into the Natural History Museum’s Gallery of Reptiles in South Kensington for the formal unveiling of the replica, the first time that any form of the Diplodocus specimen had been assembled for public viewing. (The original bones remained in Pittsburgh, and owing to the time needed to build supports that could withstand their massive weight would not be ready for display until 1907.) Newspapers from around the world were on hand to record the scene. Edwin Ray Lankester, the museum’s director and a man who was two years away from being knighted for his contributions to British science, strode to the stage. Once uncharitably described as “a massive yet nimble mind dwelt in a massive frame,” Lankester was not yet ready to hand over the crown of paleontology to the country that was the source of its largest specimens. “All the great progress that has been made in the American Republic has been founded upon ideas, which have germinated, and inventions, which have been really conceived, in England,” he said, adding that the Diplodocus was simply “an improved and enlarged form of an English creature.”
Carnegie let the infighting pass, looking toward something greater. He was one of the first to grasp the true power that gigantic dinosaurs—whether in the form of models or reconstructed skeletons—had on the public imagination, fostering a sense of unity through an appreciation of the size and mystery of these extinct beasts. The great cost and labor put into the dinosaur replica was successful because through it “an alliance for peace seems to have been affected . . . jointly weaving a new tie, another link binding in closer embrace the mother and the child lands,” Carnegie said in a speech at the replica’s unveiling in London.
The gift to the Natural History Museum was the beginning of what became known as Carnegie’s dinosaur diplomacy, and he soon gave additional replicas of the Diplodocus to museums throughout Europe in the belief that forging cultural bonds between countries would prevent future wars. The London specimen, now known as Dippy, became a national phenomenon. Visitors packed into the hall, leading a board member of the Natural History Museum to speculate that one day’s attendance might have been higher than its draw over the previous twenty years.
Osborn had nothing that garnered such worldwide attention. As the 1905 field season drew to a close, he pinned his hopes on the future success of the T. rex, hoping that the monster he held in storage would vault him—and the institution—past his rivals.
“The results of our season elsewhere have been very disappointing,” Osborn confided in a letter to Brown as the summer ended.