Tom Rea - Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegies Dinosaur, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

This book began one windswept day in January 1990, when Brent Breithaupt, curator of the University of Wyoming Geological Museum, and I rode with two other friends in a Subaru out north of Como Bluff to look for the spot where Diplodocus carnegii was dug out of the ground in 1899. We didnt find it, that time. But Brents enthusiasm for the bone diggersespecially for one of them, Bill Reedwas infectious, and from Brent I caught the bone bug. An editor at my newspaper agreed to let me write a feature on Reed, the dinosaur, and related subjects for a supplement marking the hundredth anniversary of Wyoming statehood. In succeeding years, I wrote about other dinosaur findsand sometimes crimesaround Wyoming, often quoting Brent on their meaning and significance. His good-natured support has been part of this project from the start.

Later I visited Pittsburgh, where I had grown up admiring the dinosaurs at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. There in the archives of the Big Bone Room in the museum basement, under the careful stewardship of Elizabeth Hill, I found a rich mine of correspondence surrounding the discovery and subsequent celebrity of Diplodocus carnegii. The correspondents personalities were vivid in their letters. Combining the archival material from the bone room with other material then housed in the museum annex, the museum library, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, I found I had a story before me, one that in the past had been told only sketchily, and told wrong in many of its most important details. Equally important, I found in Betty Hill a person who knew the archival material top to bottom and to whom the actors in these eventsReed, Wortman, Hatcher, Holland, and Carnegiewere very much alive. Throughout the writing of thisbook, Ive checked my assumptions and conclusions with Betty. We disagree, I think, on only one of them.

At the Carnegie, I am also grateful to Deborah Harding, who oversees the anthropology collectionsincluding Hollands lettersat the museum annex, to Bernadette Callery and her staff at the museum library for access to so many of Hollands letters there, to Carnegie Magazine editor Bob Gangewere for his thoughts on Andrew Carnegies personality, to Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Mary Dawson, who quietly encouraged her staff to help me out, and to curator Chris Beard, who read a draft of this book and steered me to some interesting contemporary science on sauropods.

In Wyoming I need especially to thank Beth Southwell, a paleontologist and volunteer at the UW Geological Museum, whose generosity and expertise on dinosaurs, their early collectors, and especially on the Fossil Fields Expedition of 1899 saved me mountains of time. It was in Beths Toyota that she, Brent, and I finally did find the Diplodocus carnegii quarry, one hot day in August 2000. Paleontologist Bob Bakker and geologist Melissa Connely, then both connected with Casper Colleges Tate Museum, kindly let my son Max and me accompany them and their crews of dino-digging vacationers for two days work on sauropod and Allosaurus bones at Como Bluff in the summer of 1999, providing me more insights than they may have known.

UW History Professor Phil Roberts helped me thread the labyrinths of nineteenth-century land and mineral-claims law in the West, and UW History Professor Emeritus Roger Williams, author of a biography of the great botanist Aven Nelson, helped me better understand Wyoming university politics at the turn of the last century. At the universitys American Heritage Center, archivists Ginny Kylander, Matt Sprinkle, and Leslie Shores helped me find photos and documents. Rebekah Johnston at the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania helped me locate photos, as did the staff at the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne. At the Casper College library, my old friend and former bookstore colleague Kevin Anderson cheerfully gave me many hours of his time scanning photos and documents into electronic sendability. But I couldnt have researched the book at all without Laurie Lye and her assistant Kirsten Olson,whose good-humored skill at the interlibrary loan desk transformed the Casper College library into one as big as any in the world.

Among scholars I owe a profound intellectual debt to Ronald Rainger, of Texas Tech University, whose book on Osborn and especially whose 1990 article in Earth Sciences History on Wortman, Hatcher, Osborn, and Holland helped me see the class tensions behind these mens professional relationships. I also need to thank Jack McIntosh, now emeritus at Wesleyan University, the worlds leading authority on sauropods, who seems to know off the top of his head the condition, whereabouts, catalog number, quarry site, and collector of every sauropod ever dug, and who assured me Hatchers designation of Diplodocus carnegii as a separate species was sound. Im also grateful to Don Baird, retired curator of the geology museum at Princeton, who told me his fathers story about Hollands medals, and to Michael Woodburne of the University of California, Riverside, for his expertise on recent fossil discoveries in Antarctica. Hugh Torrens, historian of geology at Keele University, in Staffordshire, U.K., helped me take Prof. Lankester at his word when he said Diplodocus carnegii had been erected in the Natural History Museums Gallery of Reptiles only because the Hall of Paleontology was already full. Closer to home, Jerry Nelson of Casper College helped me with Como Bluff and Rocky Mountain geology, and Will Robinson of Casper College and Scott Seville of the University of Wyoming/Casper College Center helped me think more clearly about evolution.

My Wyoming friend and now transplanted New Yorker, Mike Fleming, scouted the archives of the Osborn Collection at the American Museum of Natural History, and found for me some revealing letters on the competition between the American and Carnegie museums. Michael Kohl, of the University of South Carolina, coeditor with McIntosh of Arthur Lakess journals from Colorado and Como Bluff, kindly provided me with a biographical sketch of Reed written by his son-in-law in the 1950s, a document I had been unable to find anywhere else. Similarly, David Rains Wallace, author of a recent book on the Cope-Marsh feud, provided the clue I needed to locate at last the correct source for the Most Colossal Animal Ever On Earth newspaper story.

Natrona County High School language teachers Scott Under-brink and Kay Freire in Casper, and my daughter, Hannah, helped me translate some Hatcher and Holland correspondence from French and Spanish. A couple of friends, Paul Hannan and Cherie Winner, read early chunks of the book and did their best to liven my approach; my friend George Gibson did the same and, crucially, helped me narrow it; and my newspaper comrade, the gentlemanly Dan Whipple, first gave me rein years ago to write enough on this subject to become absorbed by it in the first place.