All Gone to Look for America (19 page)

What is most remarkable about his state of preservation is that indentations in the outer layer of sandstone clearly represent actual scales – about the size of an adult’s little fingernail – covering his skin in the tail region. If the CAT scan works out as imagined, they might – just might – be able to discover what colour he was. Our conventional representation of most dinosaurs as green comes simply from the fact that we tend to think of most modern reptiles as green; the latter isn’t actually true, so the former certainly isn’t either:

‘He might have been muddy brown. Or even yellow.’

Bob, she tells me quietly, to spare his blushes, was one of the first to oppose the old, once commonly-held perception of dinosaurs as sluggish,
cold-blooded
creatures, and suggest they might have been fast-moving bird-like animals. Where would Steven Spielberg have been without him? In fact, I later
learn, Bob was a key adviser in the making of
Jurassic Park
. Spielberg was so taken with Dr Robert T. Bakker that the bearded palaeontologist Dr Robert Burke was deliberately intended as an affectionate reference. Even if he did get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus. Come to think of it, Bakker might think that one hell of a way to go!

‘Old Leonardo here was probably got by a meat-eater who then got
distracted
. What we’re doing is reconstructing the circumstances of his death.’

‘Sort of like CSI Montana, 70,000,000
BC
,’ I suggest.

‘Yep, he’s a vic!’

She points out thin lines and dots made as if with a fine chisel in the
sandstone
of the fossilised mummy: ‘We’ve identified at least 20 types of
fossilised
pollens, in the upper stomach and intestines alone. A lot of conifers and magnolia. It’s like having a diary of his last few days. We’ve also been able to find out more about his beak; it was made of keratin, pretty much like human fingernails.’

But what I want to know is how exactly they identify and then excavate a potential fossil site. Sue makes it sound remarkably simple, if perhaps a slightly more violent procedure than I had anticipated:

‘First somebody finds a significant bone: part of a hip or something sticking out of the rock maybe part way down an escarpment. Then we try to identify it, dig a bit more round it, and then when we’re convinced there’s something there, they use dynamite – controlled – to blow off the top of the rock, then bulldozers to lower what’s left. Then we map out roughly where we think the main bones are and start digging.’

At first they use pickaxes and shovels to break up and remove the rock and soil but then as the find begins to emerge, revert to tiny, woodworking-style awls, poking into the surrounding material and brushing away the debris, a long, slow, painstaking process, often augmented by enthusiastic amateurs in scheduled summer digs. Eventually, if a substantial skeleton emerges, they start to coat it in protective cloth and then cover that with plaster. After the top is covered, they begin to dig below until the skeleton rests on a sort of pedestal of the rock from which it has emerged, while the dig team starts the same
protective
process of applying cloths and plaster from below.

‘You actually have to get in there and hold the plaster until it dries.’ And finally when almost all of the skeleton has been excavated and covered, they ‘flip it over, hoping that no bones get displaced’, before hoisting it up with a crane onto a flat-bed truck for removal to the lab, in this case the field station.

‘Hey,’ says Bob Bakker, as if the idea just occurred to him. ‘Maybe you’d
like to ride on out to take a look at some of the sites.’ My jaw drops – like that of a detached brachylophosaurus – and Bakker smiles, and disappears into an office to make a phone call. ‘Just calling the Hammonds to clear it with them. It’s their land,’ he explains and then ushers us out with a, ‘Let’s all hop into Jack’s rig.’ And there he is standing outside with his big red truck and his guns in the back: good ol’ Jack Millar is ready to take us dino-hunting.

It’s about 10 miles out of town before we roll up off the tarmac onto the rough gravel ranch road, the big Dodge 4x4 rasping stones in a spray behind us as we bump along and then head off abruptly towards the edge of an abyss. Just before we reach it, Jack hits the brake and we come to a halt, breathless on the shore of a primeval sea. It takes Bob Bakker to make me see it. At first glance it looks like a brown and ochre moonscape, an endless canyon-like rocky plain to which rough scrub grass clings like stubble on a pockmarked face. Totally silent, with low cloud drifting in wisps below us. Surreal and savagely,
primordially
beautiful. To think this was once the tropical, lushly-foliaged shore of an ocean. In the distance there are tiny dark brown dots. Moving. I lift my camera and zoom in to find they are cattle, a dozen maybe at most, wandering
separately
from each other, picking their way across the mostly barren landscape, nibbling at whatever they can find. If they made a sound we are too far away to hear it. Now I realise why Mike, the rancher on the train, said you need at least 10,000 acres to scrape a living out here.

And then Bob is reaching out his arm pointing out the stratifications in the layers of rock that fall away beneath us. ‘Come on,’ he says, beckoning me to follow him as he bounds down the tufted rocky slope. ‘You shouldn’t just imagine it filled up with water,’ says Bob as I scrabble after him. ‘There’s been all sorts of erosion, glaciers levelling off, smoothing down, landslips.’ But by and large where the flat plains drop away Bob points out the easily
distinguishable
bands in the rock: ‘That’s bear paw,’ he says, pointing out the thick dark, lower layers, named for the geology of the Bear Paw Mountains further west, Sue would later explain. ‘All of that would have been near the bottom of the sea, and there, where it gets lighter, that’s Judith River.’ I know enough now to understand he doesn’t mean the river itself, but a stratum of rock from the specific geological formation.

He takes me further, down steep slopes of soft clay-like soil and sand covered with tiny prickly cacti and clumps of the aromatic pale green sage that grows like a weed everywhere and makes up much of the scrub. ‘Take a handful of that and stick it up your nose. Wonderful.’ And it is. Before long, Bakker is scrabbling in the soil: ‘Here, look at this, that’s a bone,’ and he hands me a tiny
shard of red-yellow striated material that on inspection I have to agree does indeed look like an ancient bone. A few minutes later, he’s found another one, larger this time. ‘Here,’ he says, pulling out something about the size of a big toe and rubbing the yellow-grey soil off it. ‘That’s another bone. You can have that one.’ I look at him doubtfully for a moment, with memories of the
black-and-white
police cars and the feds going through the field stations’s specimen boxes. And he shakes his head, and kicks at the soil and unearths a couple of small fossils which he bends down to examine: ‘Squid, what did I tell you. Turtles and squid.’ I realise that this is a man who knows – and would never jeopardise – anything remotely resembling a major find, who also knows that the land we are walking over is rich in the biological debris of a lost world, that is nowhere near as lost as most people imagine.

All of a sudden he surprises me by coming out with an unexpectedly
cultured
English accent, and then I burst into laughter as I realise Bob Bakker is doing an uncannily accurate impersonation of David Attenborough. He enjoys the BBC. Bakker the polymath is something of a fan of certain aspects of British culture – as indeed he is for aspects of Russian and Mongolian culture. He’s excavated dinosaur specimens out there too. ‘Ulaan Bataar’s a great place, but it stinks,’ he says in a sudden moment of heartfelt humanity. ‘They’re storing up a legacy of lung cancer and heart disease in all those coal-fired power stations they use. They can’t even think 10 years into the future.’

His enthusiasms extend to the Michael Caine film
Zulu
about the siege of Rorke’s Drift in South Africa, and the history of the event itself: ‘Imagine 29 Welsh engineers singing “Men of Harlech” in the face of 6,000 Zulu warriors, as well as such quintessentially British institutions as Spike Milligan and
The Goon Show
.’ Here I am on a crisp, cool sunny day staring out over thousands of square miles of vanished prehistoric ocean awash with dinosaur fossils next to a long-haired bearded man in a cowboy hat singing ‘I’m walking backwards for Christmas across the Irish Sea.’ Milligan would have loved it.

But Bob Bakker is not a fan of all things British. He has no time, for example, for Oxford University’s celebrated Richard Dawkins, the biology professor tasked with popularising science and undoubtedly the country’s most famous atheist: ‘He’s a loudmouth and an idiot. They use him to hammer God.’

Bakker is no atheist, in perhaps the same way that Einstein would never refute God. He collects religious concepts like he collects evidence of
prehistoric
life, claiming a mixed history of ‘Presbyterianism, the Church of England and Orthodox Judaism’. Which is quite a brew. But then Bakker belongs to that relatively widely represented school of science that disagrees with creationism
chiefly because of the insistence on taking holy books literally rather than as offering metaphorical explanations.

‘St Augustine collected fossils,’ he says, picking one up from the earth and tracing the lines of some long-dead invertebrate in the sandstone. ‘He was working on a way of explaining the stages of the creation, not in actual days but in eras. St Augustine was a very clever man,’ he adds, in a way you know he means Richard Dawkins is not.

Bakker is working on a book dealing with a synthesis of Biblical Christian and Jewish theology, Darwinism and palaeontology. He does not see those concepts as contradicting one another in even the remotest terms. In his world view, intelligent people can see correlations between religion and science rather than the stark opposition he believes exists primarily in the limited
imagination
of fundamentalists on both sides. He would like to think his book will help rebuff the ‘ridiculous’ claims of creationists who purport to believe the earth is only 4,237 years old: ‘Y’know that’s a modern idea, not been around that long at all: the churches were amongst the earliest supporters of science.’

‘What about Galileo?’ I venture timidly, thinking of the Catholic Church’s persecution of the great Renaissance Italian scientist. I might have expected Bakker’s response:

‘Yeah, Galileo was a jerk. He was right, but he was a jerk. What got him into trouble was he was a show-off. He annoyed people. A bit like Dawkins.’ That, at least, is one analogy I know Dawkins could live with. I respect Dawkins but I can see where Bakker is coming from. If I were a TV producer with a brief to turn out more intellectual programmes for Channel 4, I would love to put these two head-to-head. There might not be a winner but it wouldn’t half be colourful.

Set against the vast calendar of the ages spread out all around us, human life spans seem suddenly incredibly short, our time terribly constrained.
Especially
if you’ve got a train to catch. And I have. Amtrak waits for no man, even if it does frequently expect men and women to wait for it. We climb into the rig and head back for Malta halt.

We take a different route only to be jerked brutally back into
twenty-first-century
Montana as we pass by an outcrop of rock with even more spectacular views across the Cretaceous ocean – the reason we came this way – spoiled by dozens of tin cans littered across the slopes.

‘Damn kids,’ says Jack as he halts the rig and we climb down to briefly survey the marred landscape. The cans, I notice, have all got holes in them. ‘Like I said, there’s not much to do around here. They just drive out, have a few
beers and shoot ’em up.’ Malta’s young men, maybe some of them back from Iraq, maybe some of them thinking about signing up, sitting out here, under the stars, in the face of a treasure trove of the earth’s primordial history that to them must just look like an endless emptiness, hurling empty beer cans into the sky and firing holes in them with six-shooters.

‘Guns,’ says Bakker with what I think – but can’t be sure – sounds like
disapproval
, and not just of the despoilation of the landscape.

‘I always carry three rifles and a pistol in the rig,’ says Jack, just a mite
defensively
, as we climb back in.

‘Is that ’cause you’re paranoid?’ asks Sue, apparently genuinely.

‘Hell no. You might get kidnapped,’ he adds with a grin.

‘Like by those wild men in Idaho?’ says Sue. The neighbouring state has a reputation as a haven for white supremacist woodsmen militias.

‘Oh no,’ says Jack with a gesture that suggests anything Idaho can do, Montana can do better. ‘We got some of our own.’

‘How long did it take you last time you bought a gun, Jack?’ asks Sue. And he laughs. ‘Well, last time they did a full background check, so it took nearly 20 minutes. But if you have a criminal record or something, heck it can take – I dunno – maybe at least half an hour.’

Jack puts his foot down. My train is due, in theory at least, in just 20 minutes. The chances of it being on time are slight, but you can never tell. If I miss it, the next one is the same time tomorrow. And that would throw my whole
itinerary
for this section of the trip out at least by 24 hours. Outside the short distance commuter lines in New England and between Washington and New York there aren’t many Amtrak trains more than once a day.

Given just how empty the roads are, though, I’m willing Jack on to go just a little bit faster than 55 mph.

‘These roads can be a death trap,’ he says.

‘Why?’ I wonder, staring out into the emptiness in both directions.

‘Ice, elks, speed, people driving too fast just to see how fast they can go and then they find out – too fast, and drunks of course.’ He nods towards a ditch beyond a curve in the road. ‘There was a young girl got stuck in there. Lost half her butt. Imagine that. Entertaining as hell, sitting there with your butt burning. The grease’d only add to the flames. Mind you, she survived.’