Podcast Episode 3, Story Time With Dave: Jack Horner, Infamy, and Starting a Museum

Episode Transcript

Dave Trexler: What we’ve talked about so far is Jack showing up and find, , finding the babies and, and asking to. And where we left off was talking about his first trip out to the site and we, we took them out and I was surprised they didn’t have a lot of time.

Dave Trexler: And they, they were just gonna be there for a few days, And where in my entire young career at that point, my first. I thought was obvious was to always collect everything I could find on the surface, just, , set it for hours or days. It may be, and, pick up everything from the surface.

Dave Trexler: Cuz once you start disturbing the surface, you’ll bury that stuff. You’ll never find it again. So

Stacia Coverdell: that’s what interns are for.

Dave Trexler: That is what interns are for… and volunteers.

Stacia Coverdell: No, mostly interns

Dave Trexler: that’s true so anyway, it really surprised me when Bob and Jack showed up with a pick and shovel and started just digging the, the hill there and, and putting in gunny sacks.

Dave Trexler: And I, I should, I don’t know if I mentioned it in previous installment, but when we found that. Nest. There were some big, big bones part of a leg bone and a ver

Stacia Coverdell: like adult bones?

Dave Trexler: Adult bones.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay.

Dave Trexler: Laying right next to it. But they were surface, but I was really hopeful that they were connected to something related to the nest.

Dave Trexler: it would be really nice to have a story of adults and adult and babies found in the same pile, ? Pretty good evidence in nesting. And anyway, the, apparently those adult bones didn’t lead to anything because they disappeared and there’s no record in any subsequent notes or publications that they ever existed.

Dave Trexler: So I assume they were just

Stacia Coverdell: surface

Dave Trexler: surface.

Stacia Coverdell: Yeah.

Dave Trexler: Anyway. they, , put a lot of material in burlap sacks and loaded new pickup and left for the year.

Stacia Coverdell: And so did they screen wash all of that?

Dave Trexler: Not there. I,

Stacia Coverdell: well, obviously

Dave Trexler: no, we didn’t really know what happened until about three days later, seven o’clock in the morning phone starts.

Dave Trexler: And it was ABC New York. said, what is this wonderful discovery you’ve made on the Peebles ranch? Wait a second. , first of all, , what wonderful discovery are you talking about? And second of all, who’s this “Peeble’s” you’re talking because we were, the one rule that the landowner said was no publicity.

Dave Trexler: And they said, oh, the, the. Babies that, that Jack Horner just reported discovering out there. And, oh, by the way, we wanna send a, a big film crew or, there’ll be eight of us actors and, and reporters. And, and what have you in front of the camera and about 20 people in back, and we want to reenact the, the entire discovery.

Stacia Coverdell: Oh geez.

Dave Trexler: And can you imagine very private landowners having something like that?. So, our job became to, , stonewall, things like that. And we got calls from ABC, NBC, CBS. We got calls from BBC in London, they were going come over and book and all of this us with the promise that we would allow no publicity

Dave Trexler: well, that caused a rift between the rancher family and, and our family. It, my mother had babysat these kids when they were young

Dave Trexler: we were that close and all of a sudden, , we, we drive by and we hardly and wave, , it’s, , we, we feel bad because we didn’t keep our end of the bargain. There’s publicity out there with their name on it.

Dave Trexler: And there’s 10,000 people show up in Choteau in 79. There’s 20,000 in 1980, come to see the world famous baby dinosaurs and there isn’t there’s anything to see of them here and

Stacia Coverdell: cause they’re all in Princeton.

Dave Trexler: Exactly. So yeah, it, it became a, a challenge for a that way and, I’ve read in, in things that, that Jack has said that, , it came as a surprise to him that the publicity got out, that he was, actually just talking about the thing with Bob in, in a bar, in Shelby, where there just happened to be. Reporter overhearing from the next table. And that’s how the story got out.

Stacia Coverdell: You just happened to know how important this discovery was and

Dave Trexler: yeah. Something along those lines. So it, yeah, there, there was a lot of that that could have happened a lot better for everyone involved

Dave Trexler: well, maybe not, Jack’s career was made from that. That’s caddy. I shouldn’t say things like but it is we,

Stacia Coverdell: I mean, his career did take off at because of the babies.

Dave Trexler: Yep.

Stacia Coverdell: I mean, who know, who knows how long he would’ve just been a preparator, if not,

Dave Trexler: and Jack was a very good preparator and he was very knowledgeable about, , fossils and what have you just academics weren’t his thing. It’s, , it is always been a source of amusement to me that, , now one of the world’s leading academics really had no use for academics when we met.

Dave Trexler: All of this did precipitate something that is really, really spectacular. It changed the way the entire world understands dinosaurs. When those babies were first found Jack and, and mother. And I stood on the nest and argued over whether or not these babies were being cared for because at that time, dinosaurs were cold-blooded animals and, and they laid their eggs and left just like turtles and lizards and pretty much everybody else.

Stacia Coverdell: And at the time crocodile’s and alligators too

Dave Trexler: exactly. so, , when, of course my mother being who she was, sat there and, and said, oh, you see those big bones. That was mommy. And, and, , we’ve got lots of babies, , we, we have at least four or five individuals at that time. We had duplicate bones that told us, , we had more than one.

Dave Trexler: She says, it’s obviously a nest and mother cared for young.

Dave Trexler: Yeah, no, it’s, it’s not dinosaurs. Didn’t do that. Dinosaurs are cold-blooded, that’s not part of what they could do. And this argument went on for, , good five, 10 minutes, but apparently she convinced him because the next year in 79, when the publication of the aches came out

Dave Trexler: I think that the title includes something about parental care or whatever the, the idea was there. And that’s what changed the entire world. The the idea that something besides, , at that time, the, the warm blooded mammals and birds could actually care for their young was unique.

Stacia Coverdell: So in Jack’s book, he said that when they were digging up the nest, they actually found structure, right? With some like leaf litter or carbon layer at the bottom?

Dave Trexler: I read that. He, he said that there was a, a red layer and a green layer. Yeah. And there’s, there was, it was filled in carbon at the bottom and I wasn’t there when they were digging it, so.

Dave Trexler: And I’ve never seen a, a picture of what he was talking about the, the description is all in handwritten notes and drawings. So as far as objective evidence of that, I don’t know if there is any well it’s, it’s one of those things where it’s a really good

Stacia Coverdell: I mean Cope and Marsh didn’t have any pictures.

Dave Trexler: Exactly. Well it’s and, and it, but it’s a, a really good example of why documentation is so important. What we do needs to be able to be independently verified as. As scientists, we need to be able to check each other and if you go and do something that’s irreversible and don’t leave a method for others to check your work. You’re not doing science. We have to watch that even to date, I have seen so many dinosaurs prepared where all the matrix is cleaned off the bones and thrown away.

Dave Trexler: And we have a, a big problem in some of our research now, because we can’t go back on cope or Marsh’s site on, on their bones. And say “what was it buried in?” “what kind of plant scores were associated with that particular burial or things like that?” Cuz it’s fun.

Dave Trexler: It’s one of the reasons why when we’re out there, people get frustrated with me, but I insist on us taking strata samples from the, the stratum, the bones in, from the stratum above, from the stratum below. We, we. A heck of a lot of bags of dirt in our collections that, , even to this day, some people laugh at me for collecting, but it’s part of that independent evaluation potential.

Dave Trexler: You’ve gotta do that at least. I think you do.

Stacia Coverdell: It’s probably good practice

Dave Trexler: would think so. Anyway. that pretty well describes, , the discovery and the, that year, what happened after that was?

Stacia Coverdell: Yeah. So we were talking about how the babies changed everything. Then we get off on a tangent. So, so why was the, the fact that. Jack had published that, that there was parental care in his paper. Why was that so important?

Dave Trexler: That was so important because at that time, if you checked a, a textbook, even alligators and crocodiles were listed as cold-blooded animals who laid their eggs and left and in fact, they were listed as, so primitive that if they happen to be around and you disturbed the babies and, and they moved it all. Mommy would eat them.

Dave Trexler: And when you have things like that in science, it’s called dogma. We have hundreds and hundreds of years of observations that have been recorded. People seeing animals, doing something, write it. and if nobody has gone back and really checked to see if what they wrote is true, it becomes accepted without proper testing. So we have a, quite a number of things out floating around, out there today that are dogma. There, there assumptions that were made that really haven’t been tested and one of them at that time was that mommy alligator would eat her babies.

Stacia Coverdell: well, if you’re biologist sitting there seeing this mother eating her babies, I can’t imagine you’d want to hang around to to see what happened.

Dave Trexler: probably not. No, it’s probably let’s safe assumption, but what this discovery did was it triggered this whole paradigm shift. We, we always had. Mammals and birds did this. Everybody else did that. And all of a sudden we’ve got mammals and birds and at least one dinosaur does that so, yeah, it, it changed everything. Now, is it just one freak dinosaur that’s doing that or is it all dinosaurs or is it some did this and some did that. And where does that leave all of the dinosaur relatives? The lizards, the reptiles, the pterasaurs, the, all of these other related branches

Stacia Coverdell: Were there pods of alasmasaurs?

Dave Trexler: Exactly! So that part of it, the research is still going on today. We, we spawned something back in 1978 that, changed the way research is focused and in a lot of respects, the way research is done. So, yeah, it it’s quite exciting to have been a part of all of that.

Stacia Coverdell: The babies left and I’m everything I’m sure died down with the peoples and the tourists and, and all of that stuff. So

Dave Trexler: Actually, it didn’t.

Stacia Coverdell: People today don’t know where Egg Mountain is what the site became eventually.

Dave Trexler: Yep. Well, and that’s another story. the thing was we had, like I said, 10,000 people show up in show dope in 79 to see this world shaking discovery. We had 20,000 in 1980, there was nothing to show them. So, we asked jack to put in some sort of display to, , at least give these thousands of people something.

Dave Trexler: We were having a lot of disappointed people and they were causing problems. , if there’s nothing to do, if you’ve driven thousands of miles, you’re not gonna just turn around and drive home. You’re gonna go out and wander around and see if you can see anything on your own. We had trespass like you wouldn’t believe. People out walking across people’s ranches and then

Stacia Coverdell: it just wasn’t the Peebles that were, were angry. It was everyone else,

Dave Trexler: the entire ranching community.

Stacia Coverdell: It’s all your fault.

Dave Trexler: Well, and, and to this day, some people see it that way.

Stacia Coverdell: Oh, I know

Dave Trexler: The upshot of it all was there was this…back in the sixties, it was really popular to do Wild West old towns, if you will where you put a number of buildings together and, and you have different things in different buildings and, and your one’s always a museum and gift shop, and one’s probably some little deli or something. Anyway, there was one of those in Choteau that was actually in bankruptcy it was the Teton trail village. And of course we had a ranch at that time. And after years of frustration my family and I decided we, my family decided for me, we’d sell the ranch and we bought this complex out of bankruptcy mostly because when we asked Jack, , if he would leave some stuff, , in our little museum on display so that people had something to see

Dave Trexler: he shook his head and said no way that, , these are important specimens and they can’t be kept in a rattle trap building that anybody could, , open a window and walk in and, and whatever, , it, it, it had to a real museum and apparently we weren’t a real museum at that point. So we decided to create a real museum. So we bought this and, , cleared out the, the main building and, and actually most of the stuff had been cleared out for us between the bankruptcy and, and the things on.

Dave Trexler: There wasn’t much left in inside but we immediately went to Jack and said, okay, we have a museum, that’s had a sign on the building for 10 years that says museum, we’ve got a museum,

Stacia Coverdell: got a museum.

Dave Trexler: Let, let’s put some exhibits in here. Oh no, you, you misunderstood the museums. We can leave. Specimens have to be nonprofit. museums they have to be these 501(c)3 tax exempt.

Stacia Coverdell: No. Well, you can’t have specimens being sold so

Dave Trexler: well, so logical understandable. I, of course you being ranchers and, and rock shop owners, we knew nothing about 501(c) or nonprofits or whatever. So

Stacia Coverdell: you could just look it up on the internet, right.

Dave Trexler: I wished it would’ve, I’ve been so much easier back then. Anyway, what we did was took us three years, but we created a nonprofit tax exempt organization called Old Trail Museum, and in 1985, we got our IRS letter that says we were gold. And so I handed it to Jack and said, okay, here now let’s …and of course, by then he had been hired by Mueseum of Rockies and, and, they were building displays down there and, and his response was, first of all, you’re in a wooden building. It’s not fireproof . So, , it is really not a good place. And besides, , Bozeman is now got this nice new building and whatever. So people can just come there. Well, that doesn’t do anything for the local communities. So at that point, it was pretty much where we, quit even trying to work with, with Jack and, and get collections and where we just created our own.

Stacia Coverdell: So were, were people still coming Choteau to see the babies by 1985?

Dave Trexler: They were. We, we were still, well, it, if I remember right, the book dinosaur heresies, by Bob Bakker came out in 1984.

Dave Trexler: Dinosaurs did a weird thing after the, the baby discovered because for a hundred years before dinosaurs were a fad, I mean, Megalasaurs and the iguanadon were found in England in the 1920s, and then the interest died off. And then there were some other discoveries in the 1850s, and that caused a little stir and then that died off and, and dinosaurs have always been cyclic. You know, you have a year or two, and then nobody cares for the next until the next generation, about 30 years later. And then all of a sudden something happens, it’s cool again for a little while. And it goes, what? Since 1978, the interest has never died down completely. It’s it’s still had cycles

Stacia Coverdell: Usually surrounding Jurassic Park movies.

Dave Trexler: Usually! But even in the lulls, it it’s still been a, a significant interest. I was in Walmart two, three days ago, and there’s still dinosaurs on boys t-shirts and, and underwear and night nighters and things like that. So it’s still there.

Dave Trexler: And it’s interesting that it was this discovery that spawned. But back to the local and, and what have you, I can say that , once we started our own stuff and what have you, we actually ended up, , meeting with the, the Peebles family in 1985. After talking, we ended up realizing that, we, we thought they were mad at us for the publicity and no, they were actually upset with us because they had put us in charge of, , keeping these people under control and.

Stacia Coverdell: Obviously that didn’t work.

Dave Trexler: No. And we were actually told in 1980 that we were no longer welcome out there because it was a, a scientific dig and, and amateurs just had no place to.

Stacia Coverdell: So was that Jack who said that to you?

Dave Trexler: Yeah, so from 1980 on, that was why they were mad at us. Not that we had caused the publicity. Although I think there was still some of that too, but anyway, we, we repaired mended some fences repaired some bridges, whatever but it never really was the relationship we had before. Which was kind of sad. In the meantime, I promised you a separate story, cuz you had mentioned Egg Mountain.