Dig locally, think globally - paleontologist Robert Bakker

Sunset, July, 1999 by Peter Fish

We are standing on a sage-covered ridgetop when Robert Bakker produces a Bible. "Very important," he tells me. "Read Ezekiel 37:1."

Bakker strides away. He wears a saggy fisherman's vest and brandishes a ski pole. Using the ski pole as a walking stick, he paces a transect through the sage. As instructed, I open the Bible. I read:

"The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones."

This was my introduction to Como Bluff, Wyoming, and to Robert Bakker's lifework.

Bakker may not be the most famous paleontologist in the world. That honor may belong to his Montana friend, John Horner, the supposed model for the dashing dinosaur hunter of Jurassic Park. Still, a paleontologist resembling Bakker figures in Jurassic's sequel, The Lost World. "I got chewed by a Tyrannosaurus rex," Bakker boasts. "And swallowed. Proof that I am palatable."

And like Horner, Bakker has helped revolutionize our understanding of the dinosaurs, convincingly positing creatures that are faster, smarter, and infinitely more interesting than the lumbering behemoths of yore.

Much of Bakker's quarter century of work has been done here in central Wyoming, where each summer he digs with paying volunteers. The operation is not luxuriously funded. Bakker drives an aged Toyota the color of flat root beer, and when we turn on a country road toward the dig site, it rattles like something possessed. "We have to watch for badger holes," he shouts. "I love badgers, but they've cost me a couple of thousand dollars in broken axles."

We arrive. Como Bluff is a slight misnomer: It is an arch of rock sliced open by a curling river valley. Back in the 1890s, this was one of the earliest and richest dinosaur quarries in the world. The first Brontosaurus was excavated at Como Bluff; later came nodosaurs, stegosaurs, and more. But by the time Bakker was in graduate school, it was assumed that the region was played out. "Don't bother with Como Bluff," Bakker was advised. But he is not good at obeying received wisdom.

"I didn't go where other people went - where the bones are hard and the rock is soft and the digging is easy," Bakker says. "I went where the bones are soft and the digging is hard." Among his and his volunteers' finds: megalosaurs, allosaurs, and, this summer, what may be one of the earliest Cretaceous ostrich dinosaurs.

We set to work, sifting through rock on a slope overlooking the creek. Bakker's enthusiasm is hard to fight. "Our motto is 'Dig Locally, Think Globally,'" he shouts. His goal is to prove that Wyoming remains a repository of untapped fossil wealth. "Wyoming needs lots of eyes, lots of people walking a lot of gullies. We need dinosaur-watchers the way you have bird-watchers."

We spend a few hours scouring the ridges. No one finds another ostrich dinosaur, but one volunteer discovers a likely dinosaur track. It's late afternoon when we pack up and Bakker steers the Toyota out of the valley of bones and onto the main road.

"When I was growing up in New Jersey," he says, "my parents would take me to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. And the Jurassic display had brontosaurs and stegosaurs and allosaurs. All just so beautiful. And every one of the dinosaurs came from Wyoming. I told my astonished parents that (a) I was going to be a paleontologist and (b) I was going to Wyoming. I wasn't sure where Wyoming was. But I knew I was going to go here."

To join one of Robert Bakker's dinosaur digs, call (877) 996-3466. Some of the fossils Bakker and his students have found are on display at the University of Wyoming Geological Museum in Laramie (307/766-2646), others at the Glenrock Paleontology Museum in Glenrock, WY (307/436-2667).