Read Online How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner - Free Book Online

and many animals and turtles and plants and pollen and mollusks. I recruited a dozen colleagues, senior scientists at different institutions, like Bill Clemens at Berkeley, who studies mammals; Joe Hartman, in North Dakota, whose specialty is clams and snails; and Mark Goodwin, also at Berkeley, a fellow dinosaur paleontologist. I also found private funding for what promised to be an expensive few years. We had geologists, students, plant people, Mary Schweitzer for biochemistry—all working independently toward the same goal. In the summer we would have as many as fifty people in the field prospecting and excavating what they found. We are still cataloging and studying our finds.
    Even though we were set up to look for many different fossils, and we did find a variety of species, the formation is so rich in T. rex that in 2000 alone we found five specimens. The one that turned out to be most intriguing for research also turned out to be the hardest to get out of the ground.
    On the morning of June 28, Bob Harmon, a native Montanan who was in charge of my crew at the dig, set out prospecting. He took a boat to a satellite camp and walked about a mile and a half, looking for good sites. He stopped for lunch by a cliff. After lunch he looked up on the side of the cliff and saw what seemed to be an exposed fossil bone. He scrambled up about twenty feet to a ledge, but he couldn’t reach the bone, so he made his way back down the cliff and walked to the satellite camp on the shore of the reservoir.
    If it were me, I would have gone back and got myself a graduate student. But Bob didn’t get a graduate student. He got a folding chair. He scrambled back up the twenty-foot cliff with the chair. On the ledge he piled up some rocks, put the folding chair on top of the rocks, climbed up on the chair, and took photographs.
    He spotted two other bones. That made three, and by my rule of thumb, three different bones from what seems to be the same creature mean an animal that died and was preserved in one place. Over millions of years wind, rain, and rivers scatter most bones. Finding three together is a sure sign that more from that same animal are under the surface.
    The problem was that this hint of a skeleton was at the base of a forty-foot cliff, rising up from the shelf of the twenty-foot rise Bob had climbed up. I wanted to see more, but my knees have long since resigned from that sort of climbing. I brought in Nels Peterson, an engineering student and a rock climber. He brought several other climbers.
    They set up a belaying station above the cliff and lowered people down. Then they lowered small jackhammers down to the climbers to begin work, to begin what turned into years of backbreaking work. Eventually, we found both hind legs, both femurs, one tibia and a fibula and a piece of jaw, and a bunch of bones going back into that cliff. All told, we collected about 50 percent of the skeleton. It was a tyrannosaur, and as I said earlier, we called it B. rex, for Bob.
    That skeleton has led us farther into the past than any other. Not in time, but in the detail and depth of our understanding. To be sure, it is the oldest T. rex skeleton, at sixty-eight million years, but dinosaurs go back more than two hundred million years, the origin of life more than three billion. Many, many fossils are older, but few have been studied like B. rex.
    It began with the excavation, which at the time seemed like building, or perhaps taking apart, the pyramids. We, and by we I mean they, spent three years to free the bones—three years of many graduate students and numerous jackhammers, big and small.
    Once we could see the bones, the job was still far from done. The fossils had to be jacketed with plaster, and since the site was so inaccessible, the enormous plaster-jacketed loads had to be lifted out by helicopter. One jacket, including the femur, was simply too big for the helicopter, so it had to be broken in two. That small fact—that we had