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Paige Williams - The dinosaur artist : obsession, betrayal, and the quest for Earth’s ultimate trophy

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In 2012, a New York auction catalogue made an unusual offering: a superb Tyrannosaurus skeleton. In fact, Lot 49135 consisted of a nearly complete T. bataar, a close cousin to T. rex, the most famous animal that ever lived. The fossils now on display in Manhattan had been unearthed in Mongolia, some 6,000 miles away. At 8 feet high and 24 feet long, the specimen was spectacular, and the final gavel signaled a winning bid of well over $1 million. Eric Prokopi, a thirty-eight-year-old Floridian, was the man who had brought this extraordinary skeleton to market. A onetime swimmer who spent his teenage years searching for shark teeth, Prokopis singular obsession with fossils generated a thriving business hunting, preparing, and selling specimens, to clients ranging from natural history museums to avid private collectors like actor Leonardo DiCaprio. But there was a problem. This time, facing financial strain, had Prokopi gone too far? As the T. bataar went to auction, a network of paleontologists alerted the government of Mongolia to the eye-catching lot. As an international custody battle ensued, fueled by geopolitics, Prokopi watched as his own world unraveled. In the tradition of The Orchid Thief, The Dinosaur Artist is a stunning work of narrative journalism about humans relationship with natural history and a seemingly intractable conflict between science and commerce. A story that stretches from Floridas Land O Lakes to the Gobi Desert, The Dinosaur Artist illuminates the history of fossil collecting--a wildly popular, yet sometimes murky, risky business, populated by eccentrics and obsessives, where the lines between poacher and hunter, collector and smuggler, enthusiast and opportunist, can easily blur. In her first book, ... writer Paige Williams has given readers an irresistible story that spans continents, cultures, and millennia as she examines the question of who, ultimately, owns the past.--Dust jacket. Read more...

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Copyright 2018 by Paige Williams

Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket copyright 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Geologic time illustration by Dave Rainey

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Hachette Books

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First Edition: September 2018

Hachette Books is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The Hachette Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937293

ISBNs: 978-0-316-38253-3 (hardcover), 978-0-316-38250-2 (ebook)

E3-20180803-JV-PC

For my mother

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

Rachel Carson

Fossil Hunting is by far the most fascinating of all sports. The hunter never knows what his bag will be, perhaps nothing, perhaps a creature never before seen by human eyes! The fossil hunter does not kill, he resurrects. And the result of his sport is to add to the sum of human pleasure and to the treasures of human knowledge.

George Gaylord Simpson, 1934

A fed crow

Returns thirteen times

Mongolian proverb

AAPS Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences (commercial trade group)

AMNH American Museum of Natural History (New York City); occasionally referred to here as the American Museum

BLM Bureau of Land Management, a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior

CBP Customs and Border Protection, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

DOJ Department of Justice

FARA Foreign Agents Registration Act

FMNH Florida Museum of Natural History (Gainesville, Florida)

ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of Homeland Security

IRI International Republican Institute

MPP Mongolian Peoples Party (early 1920s)

MPRP Mongolian Peoples Republic Party (starting in 1924)

MUST Mongolian University of Science and Technology

NHM Natural History Museum (London)

NMNH Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Washington, DC)

NPS National Park Service

OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

PRPA Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 2009

SDNY Southern District of New York, a federal district court of the U.S. Department of Justice

SVP Society of Vertebrate Paleontology

This is a work of nonfiction. No names have been changed, no information invented. My reporting began in 2009, but for the purposes of the books final form the immersive research occurred between 2012 and 2018. In the United States, I reported in Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, DC, and Wyoming. In Mongolia, I reported in the Gobi Desert, Tv Province, and Ulaanbaatar. In Canada, I reported in Edmonton, Alberta. In Europe, I reported in Munich, Germany, and in Charmouth, London, and Lyme Regis, England. The information that I gleaned from interviews with paleontologists, geologists, fossil dealers, preparators, collectors, museum curators, auctioneers, law enforcement, and various government agents may not appear in full here, yet these generous peoples insights informed the work. Written source material, some of it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, included unclassified and declassified U.S. embassy cables and State Department reports, civil lawsuits, Department of Justice criminal case files and asset forfeiture records, library collections, news archives, peer-reviewed research papers, and county court documents. I also relied upon sources personal photos, videos, correspondence, and papers. Mongolian documents were translated by Mongolians unrelated to the Mongolian government or the T. bataar case.

Much of this book grew out of Bones of Contention, a piece that I wrote for The New Yorker in January 2013. There, as here, I tried to convey the nuances of the debate over who owns, or should be allowed to collect and own, natural history, and how that conflict may in turn affect a range of interests, including public policy, science, museums, and geopolitics. Various scenes I observed directly. For convenience, I occasionally interchange dinosaur, fossil dinosaur, and skeletonwriting that someone bought a dinosaur I of course refer to the extinct animals stony remains. Likewise, I occasionally use bone for fossil, having explained that fossilization yields rock. The title The Dinosaur Artist is not intended to refer exclusively to a leading subject of this book, Eric Prokopi, but rather also to dinosaurs unparalleled power to remain culturally, scientifically, and aesthetically relevant despite extinction, and to the long, crucial intersection between science and art. Some readers may also choose to infer the formal definition of the word: a habitual practitioner, of a specified reprehensible activity. When speaking, some scientists refer to natural history museums by their acronyms (AMNH instead of the AMNH); although the AMNH clangs in my ear, I use that construction for clarity. Ive borrowed slivers of my own language from the original New Yorker piece and from a Smithsonian article I later wrote about the endangered takhi horse, a creature that was a divine thrill to see in person on the Mongolian steppe.

In the summer of 2009, I came across a newspaper item about a Montana man convicted of stealing a dinosaur. The idea sounded preposterous. How was stealing a dinosaur even possible? And who would want to?

Nearly a decade earlier, this man, Nate Murphy, who led fossil-hunting tours in a geological signature in Montana called the Judith River Formation, had become well known for unveiling Leonardo, a late Cretaceous Brachylophosaurus and one of the best-preserved dinosaur skeletons ever found. A volunteer fossil hunter named Dan Stephenson had found the skeleton during one of Murphys excursions on a private ranch near the small town of Malta. The remains constituted the first sub-adult of its kind on record and, remarkably, still bore traces of skin, scales, muscle, foot padsand even his last meal in his stomach, National Geographic reported. To find one with so much external detail available, its like going from a horse and buggy to a steam combustion engine, Murphy told the magazine. It will advance our science a quantum leap.

Our science was an intriguing phrase. Murphy wasnt a trained scientist; he was an outdoorsman who had taught himself how to hunt fossils in the Cretaceous-bearing formations that run with photogenic accessibility through states like Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and South Dakota. He believed he had something to offer paleontology, and, presumably in pursuit of this idea, he had taken fossils that didnt belong to him. (Not Leonardo; another dinosaur.) What at first appeared to be little more than a bizarre true-crime story became, to me, an absorbing question of our ongoing relationship with natural history, with the remnants of a world long gone.

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