Choteau Archives - The Montana Dinosaur Center

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

In today’s episode we wrap up the “Story Time with Dave” 2018 sessions. Montana Dinosaur Center Founder Dave Trexler and now-President Stacia Coverdell talk about the origins of the “Egg Mountain” name, Fran Tannenbaum’s discovery of the first intact fossilized eggs in North America, and the issues that Egg Mountain brought to modern paleontology in north central Montana.

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

In Today’s episode we continue “Story Time with Dave”. Dave Trexler, our founder and resident paleontologist, talks about the fallout of publicity around the discovery of the baby dinosaur fossils, and what happened locally.

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

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.

Podcast Episode 1, Story Time With Dave: Dave & Family Get Into Dinos Show Notes

In this episode, Dave talks about growing up in rural Montana, his and his mom’s interest in dinosaur fossil hunting, and how she discovered the skeleton of the first baby dinosaur.

Stacia Coverdell: Your mom got started with paleontology in 1917, huh?

Dave Trexler: Yeah, I was thinking about how all of this got started and my family actually homesteaded in this part of the country in 1913, same year. Eugene ser found the first dinosaur bone in this particular part of the country. And in 1917, my mother was five years old.

She found her first dinosaur bone. And the way that came about was back in those days, we didn’t have the ability to get rid of problems in cattle like we do today, you know, the flies and, things that attack cows during the hot summer months are now controlled with Oilers and, and things that they can rub on.

But back then, the only way they had to get rid of the parasites was to dip the cattle, which meant running them through a pool of water that. Film of, of Creso poured over the top of it. so it, it was kind of a messy job. You, you had to run the cow into the tank and then you had to push your head and make sure the, the body all got covered.

And then they come back out

Stacia Coverdell: mm-hmm

well, those tanks were Fu and far. So, you know, there wasn’t one on every property. In fact, there was only one in this part of the country. It was up by the, by the reservoir. And you had to trail the cattle up to the, what they called the dipping bat.

Mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: and. When mother was five years old, she was for her birthday, given her very first horse. And because she had a horse, she was allowed to trail the cattle up to the dipping bet. She wasn’t allowed to dip them. because. Five year olds that had cattle litter

Stacia Coverdell: freaked out,

freaked out don’t get along too well. So there was a, a ranch foreman that was pretty much her father figure, if you will, that was quite a cowboy in his own. Right. He. Drove freight wagon from Fort shot, Fort McCloud back in the early days. And he would rode with Charlie Russell and, and all of that. Anyway, he was the person who was in charge of the ranch and actually dipping the cows. so they. This day came along when it was time to perform this task. And they trailed the cows up to the dipping rats.

And when they got there Bob, that was the foreman’s name told mother that she wasn’t allowed to help dip, but, you know, she could go over the hill side there and, and look. Pretty rocks or whatever. And, and when they’re done dipping the cattle, she’ll, you know, help trail ’em back home. And that’s what happened.

And of course, when the dipping and, and trailing was all done, Bob looked at her and said, so did you find any pretty rocks? And she pulled out her fines out of her pockets. he immediately picked one out of there and he said, you know what? This is, this is a piece of fossilized bone. This, this is something that used to be bone that was turned to stone and it’s from a prehistoric animal.

And that set the stage for her interest in fossils from then till the day she died.

Mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: and of course, fast forward that till. I would say late 19 hundreds, but that would be lying. 1950s, sixties and her own boy is in the same age and interested in, in fossils. And so we went fossil, I think from the time I can remember the fossils that we found were generally. That’s pretty much what you find

Stacia Coverdell: mm-hmm ,

but that all changed in 1971.

Dave Trexler: We were out for an afternoon day off, if you will. And one of my mother and my favorite things once I got old enough was to jump on the back of my motorcycle. Put across the Prairie and, and look for whatever was lying around there. My mother and, and by extension myself were, were raised on horseback.

She loved her horses.

Stacia Coverdell: Mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: and from the time I could remember. You know, the, the thing you did, what, regardless of what you were doing out there, it was always from horseback, but when I was, oh, 15 years old or so I bought a motorcycle and I liked the motorcycle because you don’t have to feed it. You don’t have to brush it.

You don’t have to take care of it other than put some gas and oil in it. It’s closer to the ground. So it’s easier to see things. So it got to be that mother would get on the back of my motorcycle and we put off across Prairie rather than getting on the back of a horse and right across the Prairie.

We, we were out up by the bottom reservoir this nice summer day in 71. Putting along and saw this little ledger sandstone just poking out of the, the Prairie grass.

And I noticed a dinosaur bone fragment lying along the edge of the, the rock layer

mm-hmm .

And so we stopped and got to looking around and there were a couple of great big chunks of this rock layer. Then there was a little chunk off to the end and there wasn’t much actually in the line of fossil fragments laying around.

They’re just coupled. But I rolled the, the little chunk over on the end and there’s bones articulated bones embedded in the rock. Hm. And I instantly knew that, you know, after all the years of wandering and looking and seeing nothing but fragments, we had finally found a part of a dinosaur, something that was,

Stacia Coverdell: Identifiable, and…

Dave Trexler: Recognizable. Yep, exactly. And of course my mother had, and dad had collected a, quite a number of things and we. A case or two in the, the shop, they ran this little rock shop here in buy. And in the back of the shop, there was a, a little area that was not for sale things that had been discovered over the years.

Stacia Coverdell: Mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: and we decided that, you know, this would be one of those pieces, you know, whatever it was

Stacia Coverdell: Uhhuh

Dave Trexler: because it was actually eroding out and falling apart. And, and we knew if we left it, you know, it would be gone in a few years. So we managed to roll of the blocks over actually my stepbrother.

And I we went back and, and got him. He wasn’t much interested in fossils , but he did like a challenge. So we, we took our little Jeep pickup and managed to, to. Four wheel it down into where this block of, of rocks were. And we managed to load those two great big chunks of, of rock containing all these articulated bones and the, the little chunk that I could pick up myself.

And we brought them back. you know, put preservative on ’em and set ’em up for, for display. But of course, when you find something like that, the first question is exactly what is it? Mm-hmm so as soon as we could, my mother and I arranged. A trip over the entire state of Montana. We, we went to Glen dive and we went to Malta and we went to Glasgow and we went to Jordan and everywhere. We had heard that had dinosaurs and museums and

Stacia Coverdell: Was museum the Rockies doing dinosaurs at that point,

Dave Trexler: it was not museum of the Rockies at that point was a little local history museum in a quanset hut I think I’m not. I’m trying to remember. Yeah, it was, it was just, yeah, that was what it was. Anyway the, the trip around was a real eye opener for us. We saw a skull of a triceratops in Jordan, but the only dinosaur on display was in the little town of eco lacka, clear at the other. Stayed at the end of, at that time of gravel road and it was in their county museum in the basement of their high school. And it had been put together by a couple of ranchers, like we were, and what that made us understand was all of the books and, and papers that I had.

About dinosaurs and, and the wonderful discoveries here in Montana were all about people who had come and discovered, but left nothing behind,

Stacia Coverdell: just outta curiosity.

Dave Trexler: What was the dinosaur in ECA? It was an animal that was at that time called a Nasos. Okay. And that name has since gone away. It was called an a Titan for a while.

And now they’re referred to it just as at Montessori Andin.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay.

Dave Trexler: But it was, it was a type specimen for it’s an unusual type of duct build dinosaur. so anyway the more we traveled, the more irritated we got, because this just isn’t right. You, you know, there should be something to see where.

Something important has been found. I mean, it would be like taking Roswell and then packing up and move it to New York city. We’re taking all the mummies out of Egypt. We’re taking one monies outta Egypt, all the mummies, you know, don’t, don’t leave even one back there. It, so we decided that if there’s a little museum in Ekalaka of Montana, that can put together a dinosaur and, and have one on display, there’s a little museum in Bynum that could put together a dinosaur and have one on display. So that really started. Making, we, we turned away at that point from having just a, a couple of cases and, and things that had not for sale tags on them, right. To actually separating off a section of, of the shop and labeling it. This is a museum, nothing years for sale. This is our, our. Local history, discoveries and natural history discoveries, you know, so we actually got serious about looking for stuff to display at that point.

And you liked the story about motorcycles in 1977 I went over to Conrad. to bliss cycle sales and walked into a guy. I knew bought several motorcycles from before, told him that we had just gotten permission to look on some neighbors land that was several miles away. And my little motorcycle just would not carry mother and I that far effectively.

And I needed. So. Larger because, you know, we, we like to go hunting for dinosaurs and, you know, that was the ultimate thing was motorcycle to put along and, and look more. And he sold me this really nice. Kawasaki three 50 motorcycle and mother, and I got on it and putted around and we actually found what we were looking for.

At least we thought we did. We found a hillside with dinosaur bones sticking out of the hill. And what was sticking out was a piece of a couple of the leg bones at tibia. Fibula. And what I thought was part of a femur and some rib bones, we thought we had our dinosaur to stand up. And so we started digging on it.

Stacia Coverdell: Now at this point, did you have any idea what geologic formation you were digging in or any idea of the context, the age or anything?

Dave Trexler: I did. at that time. Of course there is no internet , but I read everything that was in print pretty much at that time, I, I had, I had become the ultimate paleo geek from that generation.

And, and that was weird because back then, you know, it wasn’t every kid’s dream to become a paleontologist. It was, you were one of the weird kids at that point, if that was. But no,

Stacia Coverdell: there wasn’t any Jurassic park phase or anything?

Dave Trexler: No, actually, if you read the original book, Jurassic park was spawned by the discovery that we made at show there. The, the very first place that. Grant goes to find his dinosaur in the original Jurassic park book is snake bite Montana, 15 miles east of Choteau, which is interesting because sites about 15 miles west of Choteau. So it it’s right there.

Stacia Coverdell: It’s closer to the airport.

Dave Trexler: There you go. so, anyway we’re, we’re.

Fairly serious. And of course, mother being raised in, in, by this original area, cowboy was taught to be quite the naturalist. The, when, when you’re one of the originals in, in an area you survived by understanding every little thing. Bob could walk out across Prairie and tell you how many animals had. Across there in the past week in which direction, and, and not only what species they were, but how big they were, whether they were male or female, you know, the guy was unbelievable. And so I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t being trained in those sorts of things. And. Of course, I’m not nearly the naturalist that my mother was in, in that respect, but I still knew the difference between a fever and a tibia by the time I was four years old and things like that.

So putting an animal together, recognizing what we were seeing, wasn’t a. Comparative anatomy, dinosaur skeletons, and human skeletons and dog skeletons are for 90% level the same there, it’s just the minor differences that allow you to separate out what species or, or what it actually is.

Stacia Coverdell: Well, I imagine you butchered a, quite a few animals in your time.

Dave Trexler: Oh yeah. Well, . That’s part of growing up in the middle of nowhere, Montana and yeah, we, you know, we had to take our animals from births to being beef steak on the table, as well as. Other things. So, yeah, we, we got our sheriff comparative anatomy as well but anyway, when we found this site, that was to me my dream come true.

Hope it turns out it was not my mother’s my mother. Liked to go and look turns out she really did not like to date. So

Stacia Coverdell: it’s a little tedious out there in the sun. It is.

Dave Trexler: And the more you do it, the more tedious it can become frustrating, especially when the bones are powdery and where you have to try. Preserve as you go, you, if you lose something out there, if your powdered bone has a little wind storm blow, that removes the part of it, you can’t get that back

Stacia Coverdell: uhhuh

Dave Trexler: so whatever you do. At the start is going to determine what you end up with because it’s a one way process. So, you know, oh, in all of my reading, there was a, at that time, a chemical that was being used. In the field and in the lab to preserve fossils called ol, and it was this stable plastic material that was supposed to be, you know what you used to preserve fossil bones,

Stacia Coverdell: Uhhuh, but is that the one that killed everybody?

Dave Trexler: I tried to get some because I knew we. Some sort of preservative. And I found out that they had just recalled all of it because it turns out that a lot of the professional fossil preparators were dying because the stuff turned out to be this horrible carcinogen and the liver destroyer. It actually killed quite a number of people. So we didn’t have as paleontologist anything to replace it at that time. So we had to revert back to what we had before glyphtol to came along. And that was Shelac and , you know, here, here’s this substance that’s horrible, messy to work. Then, and it doesn’t penetrate well, but you know, at least it keeps the, the oxygen away and it glues things together enough that, you know, the little breeze isn’t going to blow your bone away.

But The problem with Shelac is it has to be recod every year or two, because it deteriorates rapidly. It’s, you know, it’s not a stable compound, but it’s better than nothing. And it’s what we had back then. That was, that was all we had to work with. So, you know, our. at that point, became trying to get this dinosaur, Doug assembled and stood up in our little museum.

And by that time I had actually met someone and gotten married and, and my wife, Laurie and I, and my mother would then go out and, you know, spend our evenings or, you know, weekend days or whatever. Doing the, the digging and, and

Stacia Coverdell: mm-hmm,

Dave Trexler: recovering and because it was slow, so slow and tedious because of the limited chemicals and things. We have it so much nicer now. but anyway it got to be a fair habit that we’d go out and dig for a couple hours. And then mother would go and wander and leave us to finish whatever digging we were doing and put sight to bed and, and pack up the tools. And she’d meet us back at the vehicle

Stacia Coverdell: mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: And this one evening we are headed back to the vehicle and here’s mother sitting. This little mounted dirt, no higher than this table. And she’s got this big smile on her face and she says, look what I found. And she held up this little bitty, dinosaur vertebra. Mm-hmm obviously, you know, babies something rather. And you can tell babies from adults. Baby bones are not well formed. You don’t have the, the hard outside surface that, that grows kind

of all the [cords] inside.

Yeah. You know, any, all animals when they’re first born are born with the spongy bone and that’s basically what. What bone is until you have a year or two of growth and, and develop the, the, you know, compact bone that coats the outside.

So anyway, we were looking at that and I was just really. excited because not only was there a little vertebrae there, I picked up a little section of a jaw bone, and I, you know, again, from knowing what I was reading and, and what have you knew that we had a little piece of a jaw from a duck bill dinosaur

Stacia Coverdell: because of the, tooth rows in.

Dave Trexler: It’s the only animal that’s built that they, the death built dinosaurs were the most wonderful critters that they had the ultimate grinding apparatus in, in their jaws.

Stacia Coverdell: Mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: the average animal, what we’re accustomed to the mammals.

Stacia Coverdell: Mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: we have a couple sets of teeth and when they fall, fall out, they’re all, we’re all done.

These dinosaurs had little rows. Holes along the bottom of their jaw, that new tooth buds could implant their entire lives

Uhhuh.

And these animals had up to 1200 teeth in their mouth at any given time and they would just keep growing teeth and growing teeth. And as they wore a old teeth, new ones would come in and replace ’em.

But that creates this. Interesting. What we call it, dental battery that is unique in the animal kingdom. So when you see one of them, you pretty well know you’ve got a duck bill dinosaur.

Stacia Coverdell: Now don’t CINs have that too. Ceratops have

Dave Trexler: the same. Type of, of grinding apparatus, but the teeth shape and, and the teeth are double rooted instead of single rooted and okay.

They look a lot different.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay. So baby duck, bill jaw,

Dave Trexler: baby duck, bill jaw. And that was. Exciting cuz now not only we got an adult duck bill that we’re gonna be able to stand up, we’ve got maybe a baby duck bill that we can stand up next to it and show, you know, cuz here here’s an animal. That’s, that’s this lump and, and here’s adult, that’s gonna be in the 20, 25 foot long range.

So you know, we’ve got, you know, the, the entire growth range apparently, you know, So, you know, the next couple weeks. Well, other than a few rainstorms that kept us from getting out there, we, we spent every chance we could out there.

Stacia Coverdell: Mm-hmm . Now, were you working on the, the adults still, or did you focus on the babies more?

Dave Trexler: We actually were working on both. I didn’t find any place where the babies were coming out of the ground, Uhhuh . And one of the things that we discovered the hard way on that first site was if you go to digging, before you pick up all of the pieces, the stuff you dig covers up those pieces and it makes it really hard to find them again.

So it became, you know, even at that time, my habit of surface collecting everything first. And then

Stacia Coverdell: mm-hmm

Dave Trexler: and of course you don’t dig unless you see where something’s sticking out and, and it tells you to dig here

Stacia Coverdell: Uhhuh.

Dave Trexler: So at that time we were digging on the adults. and we were surface collecting the, the baby bits. We were each time we would go out there, we would find another 10 or 15 baby bones.

Stacia Coverdell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Trexler: And so it was we had somewhere upward to 200 baby bones collected. Midsummer of 1978 when these two guys walked into the, the shop and were looking around the, the museum and one guy introduced himself as Jack Horner