Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306130011
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARTHA GROVES LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: PINE BUTTE SWAMP PRESERVE, MONT. LENGTH: Long
I was into dinosaurs before they became trendy.
Not that people haven't always been intrigued by these enigmatic beasts, and not that Michael Crichton's lively novel-cum-movie about bio-engineered dinosaurs running amok in a theme park didn't juice up my interest.
But dinosaurs have long held a singular fascination for me. As a tyke, I once spent hours retracing my steps home from school -- through a graveyard, no less -- trying in vain to locate the misplaced gray plastic Allosaurus that was my constant talisman.
So when I spotted the notice for a dinosaur dig workshop in Montana in my Nature Conservancy magazine last spring, a sense of exhilaration swept through me. Here was a chance to stay at a Western ranch, see a new part of the country, uncover 80-million-year-old bones that had never been seen by another human being and contribute money and labor to a worthwhile research endeavor.
What could be more fun -- even if it meant spending days on my knees on the hard, dusty ground in who-knew-what conditions?
I can dig it, I thought. "Sign me up," I told Ralph Waldt, the naturalist at the conservancy's Pine Butte Preserve and Guest Ranch in northwest Montana. I got the last of 16 spots.
Waldt explained that a good chunk ($425) of the week's $1,150 tab qualified as a tax-deductible donation that would go directly to the preserve. The rest would cover three meals a day; my own rustic cabin, complete with stone fireplace (which came in mighty handy on those brisk Montana evenings); and a week's worth of instruction from him and a visiting paleobotanist. Air fare was extra.
All I had to do was wait until September.
In the meantime, I boned up on my dinosaur knowledge by reading "Digging Dinosaurs" (Harper & Row; $8.95) by John R. "Jack" Horner, a paleontologist whose pioneering research in Montana in the last 15 years has given rise to several new theories -- among them that dinosaurs traveled in large herds and, like birds, nurtured their young in nests.
When the time finally came, I flew from San Francisco via Denver to Great Falls, Mont., named for the Missouri River falls observed by explorers Lewis and Clark in 1805. The next morning, I waited in the lobby of the Best Western for the van that would take me to the ranch.
Twenty-seven miles west of Choteau, two hours south of Glacier National Park, five miles east of the Bob Marshall Wilderness and just past a missile silo or two, the Pine Butte Preserve and Guest Ranch butt up against the edge of the rugged Eastern Front of the Rocky Mountains. The preserve and guest ranch are owned by the Nature Conservancy, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to buying and preserving land that is home to rare plants and animals.
Named for a butte that dominates the landscape, the preserve covers 18,000 acres of fen, or wetland, and prairie habitats with more than 100 species of birds, 650 species of plants and 40 species of mammals, including grizzly bears.
One square mile of the territory -- tacked on to the property in the 1980s -- was added to preserve the rich dinosaur bone bed that paleontologist Horner and his proteges have long "mined" in forbidding badlands that were once part of a ranch owned here by the Peebles family. On geological maps, the area is described as the Willow Creek anticline (a fancy name for a small hill, in this case one that has been largely eroded).
The Pine Butte Guest Ranch has a traditional Western feel. The hospitable staff carried our bags on carts to our cabins, made of native stone and wood and nestled amid aspen and cottonwood trees. A towering wood pile on each porch provided the fuel for warming nightly fires.
Each morning, we moseyed over to the main ranch house, where we sat family-style around long tables for breakfast. It consisted of such hearty fare as pancakes, bacon and eggs and -- a favorite of our group -- Cream of the West, a hot cereal made in Montana.
Our days were packed with outings, but each evening we gathered for a social hour and lively discussions over hors d'oeuvres and wine and soft drinks. As it happened, most of us were there because of an enduring love of dinosaurs that began in childhood. One man quipped that he wanted to be able to catch up with his kids' knowledge.
The three- or four-course dinners -- prepared by the ranch's friendly, kitchen staff -- were worthy of their own cookbook. Throughout the week, we had salads, vegetables, pasta, lasagna, chicken and steak. And those desserts! Peach cobbler with whipped cream, banana cake, puff pastries with ice cream. We joked that, by week's end, our arteries just might be as hard as the bones we were digging.
Dead for 65 million years, dinosaurs are still grabbing front-page headlines and commercial attention -- from the hoopla over Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" and the purple Barney of TV kid-show fame, to Maya Angelou's poem at President Clinton's inauguration, not to mention a plethora of theme parks, lunch pails, puzzles, sheets, towels, holograms and T-shirts.
Our first morning, we rose to a light dusting of snow. We headed in vans to the bone bed, where half a dozen tepee skeletons marked the campsite where Horner's crews work each summer.
Karen Chin, a paleobotanist who has worked for Horner for several years, gave us some quick instruction on how to dig without destroying the bones.
We all hit pay dirt, more or less, as we uncovered several specimens of dark gray or reddish fossilized bones. Few of them were "articulated," or connected at joints. Rather, the bones were in a huge jumble. One theory is that the herd was wiped out by a volcanic eruption, the meat cooked off by heat and the bones transported by a mudslide.
The bone bed, one of the world's richest, is 2 1/2 miles long and half-mile wide. In addition to the duck-billed maiasaurs, other species have been discovered here, including flying pterosaurs and two predators, Troodon and Albertosaurus.
I ended up with fragments that didn't amount to much, but right next to me a team excavated a femur that we eventually put in a plaster cast for shipment to the Museum of the Rockies for study.
Few experiences top seeing abundant wildlife actually in the wild, as I did in Montana -- unless it's digging up the bones of extinct beasts never seen by a single soul. Uncovering that first bit of gray rib -- no matter how insignificant it might have been in the grand scientific scheme of things -- was a thrill I'll never forget.
by CNB