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Dinosaur dreamer

Natural History, Feb, 2002 by Michael Novacek

As odd as it may seem, Los Angeles is a particularly good place to become a paleontologist. As a young boy, I didn't always appreciate this. But on rare days when a hair-dryer wind from the desert blew the smog offshore, I would lope up to a hilltop street appropriately named Grandview. The cleansing wind would open the usual view--a bristle of telephone poles and TV antennas rising in the haze--to the whole sweep of the Pacific and the San Gabriel Mountains.

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I hardly seemed cut out for bone hunting. I was not much of an athlete and so nearsighted that by third grade I wore gigantic tortoiseshell glasses. But I could run fast and far, climb pretty well, and I was not at all reluctant to be alone over stretches of time. I liked crawling around in the dirt, turning over rocks, and looking at things through binoculars and microscopes. Neighborhood encounters with fossil bones required some imagination. A vacant, weed-choked lot became a fossil strewn desert with endless prospects. One such area was a spit of eroded sand and gravel that divided a broad street a few blocks from my house. Crossing the gravel one day, I saw a string of fragmented concrete blocks that looked for all the world like the vertebral column of a long-necked sauropod dinosaur. I recruited friends, as well as my rather forcefully conscripted younger brother, to excavate this monster. Our make-believe work on "Dinosaur Island" was my first field expedition.

I read books about real expeditions to canyons and deserts, and I went as often as possible with my parents to Rancho La Brea Park, in the center of Los Angeles. Now the site of the Page Museum, back then the park consisted of poorly manicured tawny grass and dusty oak trees; tar (actually asphalt, a mix of tar and sand) bubbled up in places and formed small pools. I would stare at those pools, hoping to witness history in the making if a hapless squirrel or sparrow got too close and stuck fast. The evidence for occasional deaths was abundant. It was a thrill to see a feather sticking out of the tar like a quill pen in an inkwell. Death did not seem in any way dark or frightening; it was an inevitable conclusion and left fascinating evidence of an earlier life.

My favorite features at Rancho La Brea were the life-size statues of saber-toothed tigers and imperial mammoths. Some ten miles away, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, a stupendous array of the tar-stained black bones of such animals filled the halls, and above them was a mural by the great painter of prehistory Charles R. Knight, depicting southern California 12,000 years ago. Against the blue of a mountain range--the same profile of peaks I could see from Grandview--were vultures, mammoths, dire wolves, La Brea camels, saber-toothed cats, and giant ground sloths.

To me, Rancho La Brea and its fossils were a miraculous gift to Los Angeles. In Catholic school, a nun who had visited Lourdes regaled us with tales of the astounding cures of ailing pilgrims who partook of the holy waters there. Lourdes did not seem at all interesting to me, while La Brea was both fantastic and real. My predilection for evidence and empiricism, however, was not always rewarded. Our fourth-grade class was divided into three sections according to our perceived intelligence and acceptability: the "Dummies," the "Smarties," and the middle, purgatorial group in which I held a dubious place of honor, the "Spacemen." I tried to transport myself out of my seat as often as possible, usually by concealing my favorite science book behind a catechism. One day as I savored the painting of Ice Age mammals in the large and not easily concealed Time-Life book The World We Live In, the nun swooped down on me. "There you are once again reading about monsters!" she shouted.

Later that afternoon I sat on the porch at home reading the book and sipping lemonade. I daydreamed about a Los Angeles lost in time, about Montana badlands and the empty red deserts of Central Asia, of all the continents, canyons, and quarries still waiting to be plundered for fossils. It was good to be a "Spaceman."

Adapted from Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Ancient Mammals From Montana to Mongolia, by Michael Novacek. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright c 2002 by Michael Novacek. All rights reserved.

Michael Novacek is Senior Vice President and Provost of Science and a curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Dinosaur dreamer

Natural History, Feb, 2002 by Michael Novacek

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