How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner Page B

account of the early paleontologists, he acquired an Indian name that suggested the hazards of paleontology at the time, “the man who picks up stones while running.”
    Fossils were, however, well known to American Indians, so if he did have that name, the stones he was picking up must not have been obviously old bones. Dinosaur skeletons, and mammal and reptile and other skeletons, had been weathering out during the thirteen thousand years when the first Americans occupied the continent. And these early Americans had, of course, found the fossils and come up with their own interpretations, weaving the bones of mastodons, mosasaurs, and pterosaurs into legends of thunder beings and water monsters. Based on the discoveries of shells and other remnants of marine creatures in places that the inland sea had covered, many Indian tribes believed that the land they were on had been underwater at some point. Like paleontologists after them, they, too, had a reconstructed past in mind.
    One of the first collectors in the area of Garfield County was Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History, the man who identified and named the Hell Creek Formation. He arrived shortly after Arthur Jordan, a remarkably enterprising man, who had emigrated from Scotland as a boy, and founded the town of Jordan, which began as a post office in 1899.
    In 1902 Brown was sent to explore the Hell Creek area by Henry Fairfield Osborn, the paleontologist who would become president of the museum in 1908 and preside over the glory days of the museum’s fossil collecting. This commission meant that Brown was well on his way to becoming one of the most successful and best-known collectors of dinosaur fossils. He had already been fossil hunting in Wyoming and had been told by Hornaday of fossils weathering out in the badlands near Jordan.
    On his first trip there he found fossils of an unknown dinosaur that Osborn christened Tyrannosaurus . In 1908 he found a more complete specimen here that included a well-preserved skull.
    The Hell Creek Formation has continued to attract fossil hunters of all sorts, academic and professional, and over the years has produced more than its share of tyrannosaurs and other dinosaurs. It has been studied in three states by paleontologists from all parts of the country. The reasons are those that I have already described, the exposed and weathered badlands. The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.
     
     
    So, like many others before us, our team from the Museum of the Rockies attacked the Hell Creek rocks. Although the formation is known for being rich in T. rex fossils, that was not what attracted us initially, although it certainly did pay off. We chose Hell Creek because it is not only rich in fossils but richly varied in the kinds of fossils it yields. Other sites have lots of one thing, like many duck-billed dinosaurs. Hell Creek has a wide range of dinosaurs, other reptiles, mammals, and plants.
    We planned a dig that would take a snapshot of this ecosystem at one location, focusing on as narrow a time frame as possible. No biologist would suggest that a living organism can be understood in isolation. Its living conditions, its food sources, predators, and countless other factors in its environment affect how it lives and how it has evolved. A leech makes no sense unless one knows about its environment and the creatures it feeds on.
    Near Choteau, in the Two Medicine Formation, where we found the first nesting grounds of dinosaurs in the late seventies, we had managed to get a remarkably detailed record of what seemed to be one nesting season so many millions of years ago.
    We wouldn’t be able to be quite so precise at the Hell Creek Formation, but we did hope to find fossils of many dinosaur species