Dinosaurs in the Attic Read online

  For Mom and Dad

  and

  The Magic School

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  PART I: THE HISTORY

  Chapter 1. The Museums That Almost Were

  The Great and Wonderful Paleozoic Museum

  Chapter 2. Professor Bickmore's Museum

  The Once and Future Museum

  Misery on Manhattan Square

  Chapter 3. The First Grand Expedition

  Expeditions in Asia

  The End of the Expedition

  Chapter 4. Exploration at the Top of the World

  Peary's Iron Mountain

  Chapter 5. The Search for the Arctic Atlantis

  Chapter 6. The Great Dinosaur "Gold Rush"

  Barnum Brown's Bones

  Sternberg and the Dinosaur Mummy

  Chapter 7. In Deepest Africa

  Chapter 8. Fossils in Outer Mongolia

  To the Ends of the Earth

  Chapter 9. The Thirties and Beyond

  Mountain of the Mists

  PART II: THE GRAND TOUR

  Chapter 10. A Library of Bones

  Getting Bones

  The Chubb Horses

  Jumbo the Elephant

  The Warren Mastodon

  Chapter 11. Mammals

  Meshie Mungkut

  Chapter 12. Insects

  Peripatetic Roaches (And Other Insects)

  Chapter 13. Amphibians and Reptiles

  The Dragon Lizards of Komodo

  Chapter 14. Birds

  Lord Rothschild's Birds

  The World's Biggest Nest

  Chapter 15. Anthropology

  Little Finger Nail

  Faces from the Past

  Mummies

  Chapter 16. Harry Shapiro and Peking Man

  Chapter 17. Meteorites

  Chapter 18. Minerals and Gems

  Murph the Surf

  A Cave of Gems

  From Siberia, with Love

  Conclusion

  Selected Bibliography

  Footnotes

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank a number of people for their assistance. Alan Ternes, Editor of Natural History, and Kate Bennett-Mendez had the dubious wisdom to hire me; Alan compounded the error by giving me a column in the magazine, from which this book sprang. Dr. Thomas D. Nicholson, Director of the Museum, was a great supporter and inspiration. Although a discussion of his dynamic and highly effective tenure is beyond the scope of this book, I would in any case like to acknowledge my debt to him here. I would like to express my deep appreciation to my aunt and uncle, Anna and Bob Taggart, for luring me to New York City many years ago and buying the suit for my first job interviews, without which I would undoubtedly still be buttering toast at the Newton-Wellesley Nursing Home. Finally, I must thank Lincoln Child, my editor at St. Martin's Press, for proposing this book in the first place and for his peerless editorial guidance. I have had many editors and, without question, he has been the best.

  There are many others who deserve mention here. David D. Ryus III, former Vice-President of the Museum and a close friend, deserves special thanks. Marshall Schwartzmann read first drafts of chapters and offered excellent editorial advice, saving me from embarrassment at my publisher. I also thank Ann Metcalfe, Chairwoman for Development and Public Affairs at the Museum, for reading the entire manuscript and offering suggestions. I thank Lelia Wardwell, Elisa Rothstein, and others who assisted with research. The Museum Library and its able staff under the superb direction of Nina Root were terribly patient with me during my labors, and most helpful. I acknowledge the Wang VS–80 computer for its help, although I did not appreciate its erasing seventy-five pages of my manuscript late one night. I thank the following scientists for allowing me interviews and/or reading sections of the manuscript: Dr. Jerome G. Rozen, Jr.; Dr. Malcolm McKenna; Dr. Stanley Freed (who was exceptionally helpful); Dr. Harry Shapiro; Dr. Charles Myers; Dr. David Hurst Thomas; Dr. Guy Musser; Dr. Lee Herman; Dr. Martin Prinz; Dr. George Harlow; Mr. Joe Peters; Dr. Betty Faber; Miss Alice Gray; Mrs. Barbara Conklin; Dr. Pedro Wygodzinsky; Mr. Helmut Sommer; Mr. Bill Coull; Ms. Barbara Conklin; Mr. Paul Beelitz; Mr. Anibal Rodriguez; Ms. Peggy Cooper; and many others. In addition, I'd like to thank Herb Kurz for advice (and for his future efforts publicizing the book); I wish to express my appreciation to Ernestine Weindorf for being a classy dame; I thank my former associates at Natural History, including Tom Page for being such a great guy and Florence Edelstein for trying to teach me to not split infinitives; Colleen Mehegan for carrying the torch; Bob DeAngelis and Marc Breslav for keeping things going during my leave of absence; and Lillian Berger for her honest and forceful opinion of my dreadful handwriting. I acknowledge Peggy Nicoll because she'll kill me if I don't. I thank my brothers Dick and David for leaving me with an intact cerebrum after all our childhood brawls; I thank Michelle Preston for translating the Latin on pages 178–179, which was too obscene to include; and Dr. Charles R. Crumly for explaining cladistics, among other things. I also express my deep thanks to my grandparents for passing on such excellent genes. And last but not least, I acknowledge J. G. Studholme, Chairman and Managing Director of Editions Alecto Ltd. (simply because I thought it prudent to mention the man who is currently paying my salary).

  I alone must take responsibility for any errors and faults in this book.

  Preface

  Dinosaurs in the Attic is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the explorers, scientists, and collectors who accumulated the Museum's vast collections. It tells the stories of some of the Museum's famous expeditions—as well as some of its more obscure. (Considering that there were over one thousand expeditions to choose from, I have of necessity been highly selective.)

  The second part is something of a walking tour of the Museum, the most discursive armchair ramble imaginable; we will talk with curators, explore vaults and storage rooms, take sudden and unexpected leaps in space and time, choose strange or unusual objects and tell their histories. I have been unashamedly guided by whim and prejudice. I am sure cries will be raised in the Museum about my blatant omission of one thing or another. There is nothing here about Margaret Mead, for example, perhaps the most famous curator in the Museum's history. Nor is there much about the science of ichthyology, one of the important disciplines studied in the Museum. The chapter on birds is very short and does not do justice to the Museum's seminal research in ornithology. On the other hand, I have devoted copious passages to insects, which I happen to find extremely interesting. Terribly important people in the Museum's history, such as Theodore Roosevelt, have been neglected, while I have written pages about some of the most obscure characters imaginable—people like the free-lance dinosaur hunter Charles Sternberg, whom almost no one has ever heard of.

  At first the reader may see here not a book, but a strange and wild collection of stories, histories, and anecdotes. This cannot be helped. Often the first-time visitor to the Museum sees only a confusing welter of objects. It is my great hope, however, that the reader will find this book—and this Museum—to be not so much a mass of objects and specimens, but rather a complex web of science and history, of human passions, of grand accomplishments and failures, of half-cocked ideas and brilliant insights.

  The Museum is physically compact. All of its buildings sit on a sixteen-acre parcel of ground. This is, of course, deceptive. The Museum, in its largest sense, is a diffuse, sprawling, complex and ineffable thing, whose real boundaries extend to the farthest corners of the earth. It is not, by any means, a single entity. While looking back in time may give us the impression of planned and rational growth, in truth the Museum grew in an irre
gular fashion, driven along by the diverse loves and passions of its myriad explorers, scientists, administrators, and benefactors, all of whom had different ideas of what the Museum was and should be. A straightforward, chronological history of the Museum could capture neither its true nature nor its spirit. Besides, it would have made a boring book. We will instead explore the Museum through many different eyes, and rummage about in its fascinating past.

  This book is not so much about "collections," perhaps, as about the people and passions behind them. You will not learn much about the Widmanstätten structure of iron meteorites from reading this book, or much about dinosaur evolution or universal classification. You will learn, instead, about the man who collected more dinosaurs than any other person who ever lived, and the explorer who risked his life to discover the largest meteorite in the world, and the beach bum who stole a priceless sapphire. You will read about a young explorer who became unhinged and killed his guide, and another who gave his life for his work. You will read about a British baron who lost his beloved collection of birds because of a blackmailer. If you look behind and beyond the glass display cases of the famous halls, you will learn more about human passions than about birds and butterflies and mummies.

  That is what this book is all about.

  Any attempt at enumeration of the items in the collections quickly becomes absurd. Butterflies? The Museum has 2 million of them (in addition to its 1.6 million beetles, 800,000 flies, I million spiders, and 5.5 million wasps). Bones? The Museum stores roughly 50 million of them, including 330,000 fossil vertebrates, 100 complete elephants, and the largest skeletal collection of Manhattan aborigines, among others.

  It also has one million birds, 600,000 fishes in jars of alcohol, one thirty–ton meteorite, eight million anthropological artifacts, one balding tarantula named Blondie, two skulls of Tyrannosaurus rex, several dozen dinosaur eggs, 4,000 Asian shadow puppets, 264,000 amphibians and reptiles, a stuffed gray parrot that once belonged to Houdini, the skeleton of Jumbo the elephant, 120,000 rocks and minerals, the Star of India sapphire, a grasshopper found on the observation deck of the eighty-eighth Boor of the Empire State Building, 8.5 million invertebrates, one Copper Man, 250,000 mammals, and one dodo bird.

  There are also, I am told, 17 elevators, 35,000 electrical outlets, 800 air conditioners, 400,000 square feet of glass, 25 acres of Boor space, 200 scientists and technicians, 600 employees, 1,000 volunteers, and in excess of 650 rooms. Although the Museum's exhibits cover 700,000 square feet of Boor space, only about one or two percent of the collection is on display. The rest is carefully organized, preserved, and squirreled away in hundreds of vaults, storerooms, and attics throughout the Museum's twenty-three interconnected buildings.

  The Museum defies reasonable description and enumeration. It possesses the most spiders, the most beetles, the most dinosaur bones, the most fossil mammals, the most whales, the most plant bugs, and the most birds of any museum in the world. It has the largest hippo on record (Caliph, who died in a zoo in 1908 of acute indigestion); the largest collection of skunks in formaldehyde, the largest collection of non-Western smoking pipes; the largest crab (twelve feet from tip to tip); Raffles, a starling that spoke more languages than any other bird; the longest elephant tusks; a hermaphroditic moth (left side male, right side female); the longest single piece of Peruvian cloth (about 4,500 years old and replete with ancient mummified lice); the most slowly cooled meteorite known (the Emery, found by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey); the largest collection of gall wasps (5.5 million, also collected by Kinsey); the finest collection of birds of paradise; the finest uncut emerald; the largest piece of polished jade; the largest azurite specimen (the Singing Stone, weighing 4.5 tons); the only red topaz; the largest cut gemstone (the Brazilian Princess); the only two Pachycephalosaurus skulls in existence; and the best fossil horse collection.

  Far from being a gigantic attic of seldom-seen curiosities, these collections are the lifeblood of the research that is being done at the Museum and, indeed, in the worldwide scientific community. The Museum loans out thousands of specimens a year to scientists all over the world, and hundreds of scientists come to study the collections in New York.

  Over the last several decades, the Museum has come to realize that the collections are not only more fragile than previously thought, but also far more valuable. Specimens preserved in fluids, artifacts of wood, leather, metal, feathers, and textiles, require constant care and are very expensive to stabilize and store. Furthermore, large sections of the Museum's collections have become absolutely priceless from a scientific point of view, since they could never be replaced or duplicated. The final compounding problem is that much of these collections, once considered worthless monetarily, have become highly sought after by private collectors and dealers who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for even mediocre artifacts—adding additional security requirements in a museum not designed for high-security storage.

  Over the last fifteen years alone, to conserve and stabilize the collection and provide secure, well-organized storage, the Museum has spent in excess of $39 million, and over the next ten years an additional $57 million is expected to be spent before the stabilization is complete. Even when finished, additional millions will be required to maintain the collection.

  Just as Sherlock Holmes reconstructed a crime by examining the clues, so a scientist can reconstruct evolution or figure out how a species fits into the staggeringly complex pattern of life on earth by looking at collections. These collections are the corpus delicti of natural science, but they are more than just courtroom evidence; many have great beauty or rarity, or represent nature in its most extravagant forms. And the anthropological artifacts are a record of what many peoples created and believed before their cultures were destroyed or changed by the modem world.

  Was all this material collected for the sake of science? Of course. But the urge to collect goes deeper than this. It is a part of our very nature as human beings. When dinosaur eggs were first discovered by Roy Chapman Andrews in Outer Mongolia in 1922, the world was astonished. But Andrews wasn't the first to make this discovery. Twenty thousand years earlier, humans in the area had collected dinosaur eggs, fashioned them into little squares, and placed them in graves. Our almost atavistic urge to collect, as Kenneth Clark said, is "a biological function not unrelated to our physical appetites."

  So, let us take a look at the myriad ghosts in residence at the greatest collection of all—in the American Museum of Natural History. And, if you're prepared to get a little fossil dust on your clothes, the tour is leaving right away.

  PART ONE

  THE HISTORY

  As I write this, I am in New York City, sitting in a deck chair on the roof of a building physically larger than the Empire State Building. It is sunset. Central Park stretches before me, a cold expanse of leafless trees, winding paths, and dark ponds; just the tips of the bare branches catch the autumn light. Beyond the park is a row of buildings along Fifth Avenue, their windows flashing gold, reflecting the setting sun. To my left I can see West 8Ist Street, with its row of elegant old apartment buildings, and behind me stretches a patchwork of Upper West Side rooftops. Beyond the rooftops, straight down 79th Street, lies the Hudson River, heaving slowly along like the gray back of some ancient, sluggish reptile.

  I am on the roof of the largest private museum in the world—the American Museum of Natural History. Below me lies a fantastic complex of intersecting rooflines, greenhouses, Gothic arches, and towers festooned with granite eagles and copper globes. Far below are hidden courtyards, tiny parking lots, dumpsters, and low roofs. I can see people working behind hundreds of windows grayed with Manhattan soot: hunched over desks, typing on computer terminals, or fussing with animals in aquaria.

  Beneath me, somewhere in this vast maze of buildings—the largest repository of scientific collections in the world—is a beetle. This beetle is no bigger than a grain of sand; to the naked eye it is merely a brown dot, the size of the perio
d at the end of this sentence. Sandwiched between glass on a slide, it can be identified only with the aid of a microscope.

  I have chosen this fellow—perversely, you might think—as the starting point for our exploration of this gigantic and unclassifiable storehouse of nature. I have chosen it because it is the meanest, tiniest, and ugliest specimen I could find in the Museum. Indeed, the beetle seems to lack any redeeming quality whatsoever; aside from being small and insignificant, it is also boring.

  This creature is a common insect known to science as Bambara intricata. It belongs to the family of "featherwing" beetles, so called because they possess long feathery hairs on their wings. These hairs enable them to drift on the wind, much like dandelion seeds. This particular specimen is locked up with moth flakes in a clean white cabinet along with tens of thousands of other insects. Like all the Museum's specimens, it is carefully preserved to last for an eternity—or at least for as long as modern technology can afford.

  This species spends its three-week life span buried in the decaying litter of the forest floor, feeding mostly on fungus spores. It is a peaceful insect, neither an annoying pest nor a crop destroyer. Although it is extremely common (literally billions can be found in most continents of the world), its existence is unknown to all humanity save for a dozen or so entomologists; and of these, only two or three have any real interest in the bug. As I sit on the roof of this Museum and consider that here, beneath me, are some of the most beautiful, rare, and extravagant creations of nature and man, I wonder what could possibly be important enough about this little beetle to warrant its inclusion in the Museum's collections.