Buried Treasure

Seventy-seven million years ago--nearing the end of the age of dinosaurs, although they still had 12 million years to go--a young duck-billed hadrosaur lay down to die just over the horizon from the vast inland sea that covered much of central North America. Dinosaurs did not ordinarily rest easy in death: they were torn apart by scavengers or washed downstream in a flood, and their bones were scattered and lost, at least until people arrived to dig them up. Many of the skeletons in museums today are made up of bones that never stood together in life. But this dinosaur met a different fate. Lying on its side in a shallow river, the carcass was quickly buried in a fine-grained sediment that preserved not just the shape of the bones, but impressions of the skin and flesh, and a tantalizing suggestion of organs within. When he first laid eyes on it, in a small museum in north-central Montana, the famous dinosaur researcher Robert Bakker whipped off his hat and fell to his knees, and tears welled up in his eyes. "It was," he says, "like seeing the Pieta."

You don't have to share Bakker's passion for dinosaurs to appreciate this unique animal, whose photo appears for the first time in this issue of NEWSWEEK (above). Barely emerging from the rock, lying with its head bent back as if held by the current against a stream bank, it evokes, far better than any mounted skeleton, a real animal that lived and died. Four years after the freelance paleontologist Nate Murphy dug it out of a Montana hillside, he is still pondering how to study the insides of an animal that has turned to rock without destroying it in the process. "I'm not sure what we're going to find," he muses. "Did it have a crop in there to help it digest plants? We might be able to see the heart. Was it three-chambered [like a modern reptile], or four-chambered like a bird? Wouldn't it be great to know that?"

Even to imagine looking inside an intact dinosaur amounts to a revolution in paleontology, a field in which entire life histories are routinely inferred from a tooth. Another revolution is already underway: skeletons that have stood mutely for years are yielding their secrets to researchers armed with CT scans and supercomputers and sheer ingenuity. A biologist dissolves the mineral matrix in a dinosaur bone, and finds, amazingly, evidence of blood vessels and even corpuscles. The speed of Tyrannosaurus, long a topic of fervent guesswork, is now being calculated by the algorithms of biomechanics. Engineers have radically revised our view of how the giant long-necked sauropods stood and walked. Dinosaur dioramas in museums are sprouting feathers--unsuspected just a decade ago--as evidence accumulates for the close relationship of dinosaurs with birds. These discoveries are explored in a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the first major dinosaur exhibit there in five years. Over the past 20 years, says Mark Norell, the museum's head of paleontology, his field has left its roots in taxonomy to traffic in speculation on dinosaur physiology, ecology and even behavior. It is, he says, a branch of science no longer driven just by discoveries, but by research and experiment.

Yet discoveries haven't slowed down, either; Earth still hides secrets from its past, and the turn of every season uncovers new skeletons as the land erodes around them. New kinds of dinosaurs are described every month. Peter Makovicky, curator of dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago, estimates there are 900 valid genuses, at least double the figure from two decades ago. (Many, of course, are known only by skulls, or even parts of skulls; as Bakker has found, even with a creature as big as five-ton triceratops, "usually you don't get much of the body, because someone chomped on the body.") Farmers in the Chinese province of Liaoning are uncovering, in a series of exquisitely preserved fossils, evidence of an entire ecosystem of plants, insects, fish, turtles, small mammals and birdlike dinosaurs never seen before. The Dilong paradoxus, a five-foot-long early relative of Tyrannosaurus, with rudimentary feathers evidently meant for warmth, not flying. Or Microraptor gui, whose feathered hind limbs must have given it the appearance of a four-winged bird. In the badlands of Patagonia and in the American West, the cycle of soil deposition, uplift and erosion has come full circle since the Late Cretaceous, exposing sediments that last saw the light 70 million years ago. In these places, dinosaur bones are lying out on the ground, just waiting to be picked up by someone who can tell them from rocks. (One test is to lick it; bone sticks to the tongue.) Two years ago brothers Steve and Patrick Saulsbury from Sioux City, Iowa--a physician and a veterinarian--were out with their friend Brian Buckmeier--a lawyer--looking for fossils in the rugged hills of western South Dakota. They spotted a bony knob the size of a quarter at the base of a hill, and 30 feet higher up, a couple of blackened teeth. They were attached to the skull of a pachycephalosaur, one of a group of horse-size dinosaurs distinguished by an impressive array of knobs, spikes and crests surrounding their bulging foreheads. But, unlike every other specimen known from North America, this one had a flat, rather than domed, forehead. "The flatheads are known from earlier periods in China and Mongolia," says Bakker, "but around 80 million years ago they evolved domes, and that's all we've found in North America. Until this one, which dates from right before dinosaurs were about to go extinct. I've written about how dinosaurs were slowing down, not budding off new species. I was wrong."

It's hard to imagine a lawyer in his spare time making a discovery in, say, molecular genetics, but dinosaur paleontology remains closer in spirit to the scientific world of Darwin than of Crick and Watson. Big universities compete with regional institutions like the Black Hills Museum of Natural History in South Dakota and the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The Saulsburys donated their pachy skull to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Academic credentials are optional; Nate Murphy learned about dinosaurs from his grandmother, the noted paleontologist Nelda Wright, but he doesn't even have a college degree. To fund his studies he established a research center in a former tire shop in the remote town of Malta, Mont., staffed largely by volunteers and supported by a trickle of tourists and by adventure-seekers who pay him for the privilege of tramping the countryside in search of the next T. rex. A wealthy New York dinosaur enthusiast named Coleman Burke personally underwrote Murphy's fossil-collecting trip to Patagonia last year. Dinosaurs lack a strong funding constituency in the corporate world, except for Universal Studios and Steven Spielberg, who established a "Jurassic Park Institute" to recycle some of their brontosaurian profits into grants for fieldwork. Creationists, who think dinosaurs died in the Flood, have their own issues with paleontology, as did a Brooklyn rabbi who wrote Norell to complain that if word got out that birds were really dinosaurs, people might decide that chickens weren't kosher.

It was on a fossil-hunting trip in the summer of 2000 that one of Murphy's volunteers spotted a bone poking out of a low west-facing bluff in the remote reaches of a cattle ranch north of Malta. Murphy's chief assistant--his teenage son, Matt--dug down just far enough to uncover four tail vertebrae, and called over his father. Nate, an easygoing, unflappable scientist perpetually clad in khaki shorts and a bush hat, compensates for a lack of formal training with a remarkable gift for visualizing how bones fit together to make an animal. Looking up at the bluff, he spotted what to him was unmistakably the outline of a pelvis and an ankle. The next day he shared his discovery with the rancher on whose land it was found.