baby dinosaur Archives - The Montana Dinosaur Center

In this episode, Dave talks about meeting Jack Horner, realizing the discovery and significance of the baby bones, and why clear ownership matters in science.

Episode Transcript

Stacia Coverdell: When we were sitting here last we were talking about how your mom had discovered babies and how you got into paleontology. And you know, when we left off, Jack had just entered the rock shop. What happened after that moment? Like Jack walks in and then what happened?

Dave Trexler: To I guess lead into that about three weeks before Jack walked in, we had a paleontologist, a mammal guy out of Berkeley stop in the shop by the name of Bill Clemens.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay.

Dave Trexler: And he’s actually still a emeritus paleontologist at Berkeley, but. anyway, he liked our little attempt at a museum. And as we found out later, he was headed down to a fish research project down by Lewistown. And when he showed up there Bob Makala and Jack Horner were also on the site and being Montana boys. what have you, he mentioned that they ought to come up and check out our little facility and give us a hand if they could, cuz he really thought it was cool to have a second museum out in the middle of nowhere doing something with dinosaurs.

Stacia Coverdell: And you had set this little museum up in the back half of the rock shop.

Stacia Coverdell: That’s still

Dave Trexler: across the street, still across the street. Still there today. the yeah, we had. basically turned the back third of the, the building into museum

Dave Trexler: .

Dave Trexler: And so once the fish dig was done, Bob and Jack came up and came in our little facility and we’re looking around and identifying a few things that I didn’t know exactly what were that sort of thing.

Dave Trexler: We. Lot of mammal teeth from the white river Badlands brutal formation.

Stacia Coverdell: Where’s that?

Dave Trexler: Oh, Nebraska, South Dakota.

Stacia Coverdell: Oh, okay. That’s just stuff that you and your mom had picked up?

Dave Trexler: Actually, it was stuff that my mother and dad had collected back in the twenties and thirties. Cool. So that was a whole shelf in the case.

Dave Trexler: To this day. I am not interested in dentistry.

Stacia Coverdell: Do we have those specimens?

Dave Trexler: Actually, they are in collections at the Old Trail Museum.

Stacia Coverdell: Oh, okay.

Dave Trexler: They are still, I think in their collections, we might have gotten them, but there’s some that I think they reserve for,

Stacia Coverdell: for their displays and stuff.

Dave Trexler: Look we,

Stacia Coverdell: Patrick likes teeth!

Dave Trexler: That that’s the frustration with mammal stuff is mammals are all identified by the number of ridges and, and holes that the bumps match up with on other teeth. And, and it’s just. Looking at the surfaces of teeth under microscope. And there’s so much more to an animal than that. So I like to look at the, the entire animal, the bones where the muscles attach all of that.

Dave Trexler: So yeah, mammals never did hold that much interest to me. but anyway, so there were a lot of unidentified mammals in our case. But Jack went through and, and Bob and put identifications to a lot of the ones that were missing IDs and were, seemed to be favorably impressed with what we were doing.

Dave Trexler: Happened to ask my mother she had anything else that was really cool. We had just been out on site collecting again, some of the stuff that had been brought to the surface after the last rain. And, she had a little box of them in the the shop we had brought over to the house she had, cuz we had actually just gotten back from that the night before.

Dave Trexler: Anyway she showed Jack a couple of little vertebrae that she found and he got fairly excited and said, do you have any more of this? And she says, son is working on the rest of it over at the house. So she sent them on over and the bones that we had collected for the most part are the ones that are on discipline are case currently

Dave Trexler:

Dave Trexler: And I was a little bit conceed I guess when I put that display together. Because I laid the bones out in the case, pretty much in the order that they were laid out when Jack walked into the house and saw ’em laid out on our living room table. So what you see in that case is pretty much what Jack saw when he first walked in, in. One of the things that was a problem for us is there was no internet.

Dave Trexler: The best you could do is enter library loan on books and things like that. And if you actually wanted to see dinosaur remains, as we talked about before

Dave Trexler: ,

Dave Trexler: We pretty much had to pack up and, and travel thousands of miles. And again,

Dave Trexler: ,

Dave Trexler: you know, jets back in the sixties and seventies aren’t like jets today.

Dave Trexler: It was a pretty major undertaking to get outside the state of Montana if you needed to, so what we had to go by was what we could see in books and what we could see in the, you know, modern nature. what’s going on on the earth today.

Dave Trexler: ,

Dave Trexler: Just local observation. So I had made the assumption that museums don’t have pictures of the, the babies that they found in books, because babies really aren’t very impressive.

Stacia Coverdell: They’re not, it just looks like a bunch of chalk that we’ve put in a case.

Dave Trexler: And to this day, it makes me frustrated and, and amused at the same time. I don’t know how many times that brought people back into our gallery. And of course there’s the, the big foam core model seismosaurus that we built a few years ago, standing in the gallery

Stacia Coverdell: A few years ago? It’s 2018 now!

Dave Trexler: Yeah. Well, it. 1998, a few years ago. Anyway, the response for people coming into the gallery is almost always the same. You walk in, you see this great big candle that is according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s largest scientifically accurate dinosaur on display

Dave Trexler:

Dave Trexler: And you walk over to this case with.

Dave Trexler: Pile of little bones in it laid out as kind of a composite of an animal. And you tell them all about how these little bones change the way the entire world understands dinosaurs

Dave Trexler:

Dave Trexler: And they’ll almost always say, well, that’s really cool, but man, there’s this big thing amazing! You know, so that was what we thought was happening back in 1978.

Dave Trexler: We had no idea that the fossil record did not represent the modern record, you know, modern record, you get a lot of young animal dying.

Stacia Coverdell: Yeah.

Dave Trexler: You get a lot of real old animal die, not a lot in the middle. And when we were out looking around, those were the fossils we found. We found a lot of little bones. We found a lot of, you know, great big old bone. Not much in the middle. And of course you can look at a skeleton even as, a rank amateur. And if you’ve ever seen a variety of modern skeletons, you can say, okay, this is a femur, this is an upper leg bone

Dave Trexler:

Dave Trexler: And that sort of thing. And teeth, as much as I hate them, always tell. What an animal eats and are very distinctive even at the, the family level.

Dave Trexler: So if you, even as a two day person out in the field has been shown, you know, a, few dinosaur teeth of the various families. Where to stumble across a, a tooth. You could probably tell the difference between a duck built tooth and a tyrannasaur tooth. And,

Stacia Coverdell: yeah,

Dave Trexler: and because I had previously read probably everything that was readily available as far as dinosaur information, by that time

Dave Trexler: ,

Dave Trexler: the ID identification of what we had laying there. the table as baby duck, bill was not difficult. It was duck built teeth. It was little tiny teeth. It was in a little tiny jaw. We had little tiny vertebrae. The other thing is animals. As they grow start out with very soft bone. There’s no hard outside shell. If you will

Dave Trexler:

Dave Trexler: On the bone until the animal gets.

Dave Trexler: So if you find bones that are fossilized that have no hard outside shell, they’re either a baby bones or B that had some major preservational bias that eroded all the hard bone off the surface . And those two are pretty easy to tell the difference between as well. So for us, it was pretty easy to, identify. We had baby duck bill bones. And so, no mystery there. I just assumed, you know, everybody had them, they just were kind of unimpressive

Dave Trexler: ,

Dave Trexler: Jack and Bob walk into the living room and look at what I’ve got laid out and Bob’s face kind of goes white and his eyes bug out a little bit. And he looks at me and says, “do you have any idea of what you have here?” well, my response is based on your reaction, apparently not.

Stacia Coverdell: And you were 23 at this point, right?

Dave Trexler: Yeah. Yeah. And he says, these are baby dinosaur bones and. He kind of looked at him and said, yeah. So , he said, they’ve never been found before. And he looks at Bob and he shakes his head and he said, Bob, you and I have been looking for babies out here for how long, and when we find them, they’re laying on somebody’s card table in the living room. A surprise to me that baby bones weren’t preserved in quantity elsewhere. Come to find out. It’s probably because most dinosaur bones are preserved in sandstone.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay.

Dave Trexler: And Sandy soils tend to be slightly acidic. And over the years you. Even mild acid will break bone down and, and cause it to go away rather than allow it to be preserved.

Dave Trexler: This area of Montana is absolutely unique in having those big, fresh Rocky mountains built to the west of us. And they were just in the process of being built when the dinosaurs were alive here.

Stacia Coverdell: And they’re all made outta limestone, right?

Dave Trexler: Those reefs you see are all limestone. Which is calcium carbonate, which is very alkaline it’s it’s, it’s where we get alkali flats from.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay.

Dave Trexler: So what we’ve had is run off water from the mountains, very, very rich in the, the basic, you know, pH stuff rather than, rather than acidic stuff.

Dave Trexler:

Dave Trexler: So probably there has never been a time when our soils were acidic enough to break any of that down.

Stacia Coverdell: At least since the cretaceous,

Dave Trexler: At least since the cretaceous .Well, probably actually since the Mississippian, but we don’t know that much about what happened before, cuz those sediments aren’t exposed

Stacia Coverdell: No, there’s 7,000 feet under the ground.

Dave Trexler: There you do. so, anyway, maybe someday, probably not in my lifetime. Well, at least I hope

Stacia Coverdell: No comment…

Dave Trexler: I hope not in my lifetime. [laughs] Anyway the, the thing about all of that is we’ve had a unique preservation in this area and it allowed those babies to be preserved where they, there’s not many other areas around the world that have those conditions. So , , that’s the reason we have babies here

Stacia Coverdell: In China, is their water alkaline? Is that why they have so much egg preservation?

Dave Trexler: The flaming cliffs area?

Stacia Coverdell: Well, I guess Mongolia as well.

Dave Trexler: Yeah.

Stacia Coverdell: flaming cliffs

Dave Trexler: That area, I think was a unique, but fairly localized event. And it was alkaline, I think for another reason, it, okay. It was a, it, it still had a, a carbonate component that was part of the source water.

Dave Trexler: So in that respect, yeah, it was similar that way.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay.

Dave Trexler: So yeah. Yeah. It’s, it pretty much takes that. When I worked out in dinosaur provincial park, we found egg shell in two locations only in that entire park. And there were just a couple little pieces that were fairly badly eroded

Dave Trexler: ,

Dave Trexler: but the two locations where we found them were in association with [hunianic] clam shells.

Stacia Coverdell: okay. So, so there was a little pocket of alkaline water around

Dave Trexler: yeah.

Stacia Coverdell: All the acid stuff. Okay.

Dave Trexler: So that’s kind of a cool way nature has such a broad diversity through time. You, you really have to take that into consideration when you’re doing the research anyway, back to our story.

Stacia Coverdell: Anyway, so Jack’s looking at the baby on the table…

Dave Trexler: and he says, “would you mind if we did some research and wrote a paper?” of course we had no problem with that. This is what we’re all about, is furthering science and increasing knowledge. So we loaned the babies to Jack and he took them off.

Dave Trexler: anyway, Jack asked if he could borrow the bones for some research and if you put also go out and, and visit the, the site

Dave Trexler:

Dave Trexler: Well, by that time, mother had come over. And we had been visiting there for a while. When Jack asked if he could borrow the, the bones she grabbed, the only sturdy container we had in the the house at the time was a old Folger’s coffee can.

Stacia Coverdell: So this is the infamous coffee can

Dave Trexler: wrapped the bones in paper towels, put ’em in the coffee can and handed them to him. He asked. He could actually visit the site as well. And when we got him permission to go out to the site, one of the other things we showed him was actually a really badly eroded skull that Laurie had found.

Dave Trexler: And it was only, oh, like a week earlier that she had found it, but we had trying to preserve it. And of course, what we had to preserve with was Shelac and it’s not very thin. You it’s really difficult to dribble. And this bone was so powdery and eroded that any little breeze come through would blow parts of the bone away that the bone was dust

Dave Trexler: I uncovered maybe an inch of it and tried to carefully dribble a little Shelac on it. And the, the Shelac hitting, it caused a, a bubble ripple in the bone. So we had walked away from it. There’s no, there’s no use trying to collect something like that. If you don’t have the right equipment, you just ruin it.

Dave Trexler: And we knew it was a skull. What was exposed there had teeth in it, and we knew it was a duck bill. And at the time, since duck bills are the most common. And, and since it was just absolutely understood that the Two Medicine was an extension of the Old Man Formation in Canada and the animals would all be the same, Jack offered to try to collect that skull and see if there was anything preserved on the other side

Stacia Coverdell: so you could put in your little museum

Dave Trexler: and, and kind of in- trade for allowing him to borrow the baby bones and do research on them. A really cool thing was when they collected it and turned it over, it happened to be to an animal that had never been seen before. They named it maiasaura.

Stacia Coverdell: Of course that had to be taken away for research.

Dave Trexler: Of course. Yep.

Stacia Coverdell: And that skull’s in Museum of the Rockies now?

Dave Trexler: I think that’s where the skull is, but technically now Yale claims ownership of it. Cuz that’s what all their paperwork says, but

Stacia Coverdell: okay.

Dave Trexler: The problem was, you know, let Jack borrow these things. He was working for Princeton.

Stacia Coverdell: Yeah.

Dave Trexler: And basically he took them and, and just put them in, gave them a, a Princeton number so that he could list them in his publication. Well, 20 years later, when it’s time to sort all this out by then Princeton university has closed its paleontology department entirely. They have given their collections to Yale.

Dave Trexler: All of the original paperwork is, in a commotion, so Yale doing due diligence when they were, you know, asked if, the babies were ready to be returned. Said “Retruned? They’re, ours.” You know?

Stacia Coverdell: Yeah. Jack was a preparer Princeton when this was all going down in 1978.

Dave Trexler: Yes. He got the position at museum of the Rockies in 1980. So the first two years out, he was here from Princeton and the skull actually, Laurie, recognizing, holotype skulls need to be in, in places that have climate control. And what have you did donate the skull, but she donated it to Museum of the Rockies.

Dave Trexler: There’s a couple of pieces of paperwork. We’ve got one of them that says she donated it to there, but Yale’s paperwork says it was theirs from Princeton. As long as it’s in a proper collection and, and properly cared for, it really doesn’t matter.

Stacia Coverdell: As long as everyone knows where it is.

Dave Trexler: There you go. So that’s really where all of this started. Jack asked if he could go and do further research out at the site and we contacted the landowner. Landowner said so long as there’s no publicity. We don’t care. Take ’em out there. But said, you have to watch them. You know, we we’re busy running cattle.

Dave Trexler: We don’t want people just running over our place, you know, whenever. So, you know, you, you need to keep track of when they’re out there and, and make sure gates are shut and all of that sort of thing. So basically we had to be out there with them whenever they wanted to go out. And that was the way it worked until 1980. When some things changed. We’ll talk about that in a while.

Dave Trexler: So you’re gonna get two installments to put on the. This is a good place to split for part two and three.

Tag: baby dinosaur

Podcast Episode 4, Story Time With Dave: Cracking Open the Story of Egg Mountain

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

Podcast Episode 2, Story Time With Dave: Jack Horner and the Baby Bones

Episode Transcript