Dinosaurs in the Attic (14 page)

Sternberg was a deeply religious man who wrote devotional poetry in his spare time, and he felt that God had particularly called him to the life of a fossil hunter. He published a wretched poem in quatrains entitled "The Story of the Past: Or, the Romance of Science."

At one point in the poem, Sternberg described what it was like to discover a fossil—in this case a mosasaur (a huge, carnivorous marine reptile) which he had found in the chalk beds of Kansas:

A grinning skull first comes in sight,

Armed with strong teeth, all shining bright.

The spinal column follows fast,

On either side great paddles cast,

While a long tail of swimming form,

Like a screw propeller it is borne.

The mended bones show us the place,

Where he was injured in the chase....

Among his other accomplishments, Sternberg discovered one of the Museum's greatest fossils. The story begins in 1908, when Sternberg wrote to the British Museum of Natural History. He knew the British Museum lacked a good
Triceratops
skull, and he offered his services. The British Museum wrote back and agreed to purchase a specimen if one was found, but would not commit itself to funding the expedition. Sternberg gave the British Museum first refusal on any other specimens as well. There was good reason to be skeptical, since the area where Sternberg claimed he could find the fossil, Converse County, Wyoming, had been thoroughly searched by the American Museum of Natural History some years before.

Sternberg was accompanied on this expedition by his three sons, who had at this point never collected a dinosaur before. They were highly enthusiastic and spent weeks scouring the remote desert without success. When their food began to run out (their diet was almost exclusively boiled potatoes), Sternberg reluctantly saddled up his horse and cart for the five-day round trip for provisions. Just before he left, his son George had found some bones sticking out of a sandstone outcropping. Sternberg gave George and Levi instructions for uncovering the fossil while he and his son Charles Jr. went into town. In his memoirs, George Sternberg wrote about the discovery:

Finally by the evening of the third day, I had traced the skeieton to the breast bone, for it lay on its back with the ends of its ribs sticking up. There was nothing unusual about that. But when I removed a rather large piece of sandstone rock from over the breast I found, much to my surprise, a perfect cast of the skin impression beautifully preserved ... traces of skin were to be seen everywhere.

When his father returned to camp, George told him about the discovery, and the father insisted on visiting the site immediately. The two arrived at the site in the gathering dusk. "One glance," George wrote, "was enough for my father to realize what I had found and what it meant to science. Will I ever forget his first remark as we stood there in the fast approaching twilight? It thrills me now as I repeat it. 'George, this is a finer fossil than I have ever found.'"

What George had found was no mere dinosaur skeleton. It was a fossilized
mummy
of a dinosaur, a kind popularly called a "duck-billed" dinosaur because of its large bill-like mouth. Skin, tendons, and shreds of flesh—all fossilized—clung to the dinosaur's gaping ribcage. The animal's head was twisted grotesquely behind its back.
^*16
Sternberg, in his
Life of a Fossil Hunter,
also wrote about the discovery:

Shall I ever experience such joy as when I stood in the quarry for the first time, and beheld lying in state the most complete skeleton of an extinct animal I have ever seen, after forty years of experience as a collector! The crowning specimen of my life's work! ... It lay there with expanded ribs as in life, wrapped in the impressions of skin whose beautiful patterns of octagonal plates marked the fine sandstone above the bones. . . . Even the flesh was replaced by sandstone. . . . How wonderful are the works of an Almighty hand!

Osborn had previously written to Sternberg expressing his doubt that the area would yield anything of value, but he had been keeping a wary eye on his activities anyway. When news of the find reached Osborn, he immediately dispatched a man to Converse County to secure the specimen, despite the fact that the British Museum, according to paleontological etiquette, had a prior claim to it. The Museum's agent appealed to Sternberg's patriotic principles with the promise that the specimen would remain in the country on display. A substantial (but unknown) cash payment sealed the deal. The duck-billed dinosaur mummy was encased in plaster and shipped to New York, where Osborn installed it in a glass case labeled "Mummy Dinosaur." It can still be seen in the Museum's Hall of Late Dinosaurs, lying in a glass case on its back, looking so much like the partially decomposed carcass it once was that one can almost smell it. Its grinning skull, partially clothed in flesh, still arcs behind the body, and traces of fossilized flesh and pebbled skin are everywhere.

Sternberg collected other specimens for the Museum, but the duck-billed mummy was certainly the finest. For the first time, paleontologists were able to study the skin of a dinosaur and other details not detectable from a skeleton. In his final years, Sternberg would visit the Museum's dinosaur halls, admiring his finds. After one such visit to the dinosaur mummy, he was inspired to write, "My own body will crumble in dust, my soul return to the God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of other days, will give joy and pleasure to generations yet unborn."

SEVEN

In Deepest Africa

The Belgian Congo, high on the slopes of Mount Mikeno. Tuesday and Wednesday, November
16
and 17, 1926:

Mr. Akeley, in effect, is growing worse and worse [the Belgian zoologist J. M. Derscheid wrote in his field journal], and I was overwhelmed by the change in his appearance. We try with every means at our disposal to keep him warm and sustain him. He has had one hemorrhage after another today, and is dreadfully weak and pale. In the last hemorrhage he lost more than a quart of blood.... He breathes with great difficulty and groans unceasingly.... During the evening he has been delerious several times, and speaks of Museum, of electrical projects, etc., etc...."

[That night.}
We take turns in watching over him. Outside, the snow-covered Karisimbi glitters in the moonlight.

At eight o'clock [A.M.] I found the pulse practically imperceptible. I asked Mr. Akeley if we might give him a hypodermic injection; he consented and I gave him a dose of caffeine. At about nine o'clock the pulse had become strong again, but the respiration remained abrupt, short and noisy. He groaned unceasingly and was entirely unconscious. I frictioned him. About eleven o'clock the heart action fell again. I gave him another injection of caffeine, but this time without result. About 11:35 there was no pulse or respiration perceptible. I had the impression he was dead. I held his hand in both of mine, watching for any sign of life. The mouth was wide open, the muscles stiffened, the eyes open in a fixed stare. As it was quite cold outside (the frost had not yet melted). I had the little tent kept very warm. I made two more injections of caffeine, but in vain. The head and the hands were growing cold, and the complexion was becoming a dull white, but it was not until about four-thirty that Mr. Raddatz and I were able to convince ourselves of the reality.

The Gorilla Group in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals depicts an actual place located less than a mile from the camp where Carl Akeley, the African explorer, died in 1926. The spot is located in the Kivu Volcanoes of the Belgian Congo, two miles high in the rain-forested slopes of Mount Mikeno (now in the Virunga National Park in Zaire, just over the border from Rwanda and Uganda). It lies just south of the Equator, in the center of the African continent. In the foreground of the diorama, a family of mountain gorillas forages for food, while the dominant male stands erect in a classic pose, beating its chest. An infant and several other gorillas sit nearby, munching on wild celery leaves. A massive tree trunk, sheathed in moss, lies rotting in the center of the scene. Framing the gorillas is a tangle of vines and ancient cusso trees, their heavy limbs hanging with moss, ferns, bearded lichen, and pendant bedstraw. Brilliant flowers and Ruwenzori blackberries grow in abundance. Behind the gorillas, the rain forest falls away into a steep declivity, dropping four thousand feet to sun-dappled plains and forests. Two giant volcanoes, Mount Nyiragongo and Mount Nyamlagira, smoke lazily in the distance, their clouds catching the amber light of late afternoon. Below and to the south lies the shining expanse of Lake Kivu. Almost invisible in the haze, at least a hundred miles away, can be seen another great mountain range on the far side of the lake. To the right rise the precipitous ramparts of Mount Mikeno itself, thickly covered with jungle foliage displaying an almost infinite range of greens and yellows. It is a scene of breathtaking beauty.

At the time of his death, Akeley was leading a small expedition to this wild and remote area of the Belgian Congo to collect plants and animals, take photographs, and paint background studies for the gorilla diorama. It was the culmination of nearly seventeen years of work on the Museum's African Hall. Accompanying Akeley were his wife, Mary L. Jobe Akeley—a well-known explorer in her own right—and three other scientists. Although Carl was sixty-two, he had recently married Mary, and this was their first trip to Africa together—a honeymoon of sorts. Carl especially wanted to bring his wife to see "the most beautiful spot in all the world"—the break in the trees that he had chosen for the gorilla diorama setting and background.

During the long trip into the African interior, Carl experienced a relapse of the fever and dysentery that had stricken him on an earlier expedition in Tanganyika, yet he insisted on pushing on. As they at last approached their destination, a camp on a high ridge between volcanoes, commanding a spectacular vista across one hundred miles of the western Congo, Akeley had to be carried much of the time in a hammock. The following day he died.

Akeley's long journey to the rain-drenched jungles of Mount Mikeno began when he was a young boy. At an early age he had developed an interest in stuffing animals, and at sixteen he felt competent enough in this profession to print up business cards that read, "Carl E. Akeley—Artistic Taxidermy in All Its Branches." At nineteen he landed a job at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, at a wage of $3.50 per day. Ward's was one of the leading taxidermy studios in the country, and it often did work for major American museums. The establishment specialized in stuffing animals and mounting skeletons, and Carl was placed in the taxidermy section. He soon tired of his work and was about to quit when news came that Jumbo, P. T. Barnum's famous elephant, had been killed by a speeding freight train in Canada. Barnum chose the Rochester studio to stuff the skin and mount the shattered bones. Akeley was charged with the task, and he did a brilliant job.

Shortly thereafter, Akeley took a job at the Field Museum in Chicago, where he worked for many years. He began collecting and mounting animals for the Field, and gradually he perfected a revolutionary new method of taxidermy (more on this later). In 1905 he mounted an impressive pair of elephants for the Field, and the American Museum sent him to Africa in 1909 to get a bigger and better group for New York.

Such collecting was not without its hazards. While Akeley was stalking an old bull elephant on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, the elephant unexpectedly charged him. Akeley's gun jammed, and in a matter of seconds the old bull was on top of him. Akeley, having mentally rehearsed just such an emergency, grabbed each tusk in his hands and swung down on the ground between them. The elephant sank his tusks into the earth, pressed his curled up trunk against Akeley's chest, and then whipped the trunk across his face, slicing open Akeley's cheek and breaking his nose. Akeley lost consciousness as the elephant continued to drive its tusks into the earth. (Had the tusks not struck an underground obstruction, Akeley would have been crushed.) The Africans fled from Akeley, thinking he was dead, and he lay unconscious for four or five hours. He finally revived, and spent three months in the bush (there was no nearby hospital) recuperating from punctured lungs and broken ribs. (On another occasion Akeley was attacked by a leopard, which he killed barehanded.)

During this long period, Akeley started thinking about the rapid changes he had seen since his first trip to Africa. The game was disappearing as civilization spread increasingly to the hinterlands, bringing with it farms and cattle. The cry was raised that the wildlife of Africa must make way for agriculture. Akeley realized that the Africa he had come to know would not last much longer. While brooding over this question, he conceived an idea.