Dinosaurs in the Attic (23 page)

30. Roy Chapman Andrews scans the desert in Mongolia for trails leading east into the Gobi Desert, 1928.

31. The Central Asiatic Expedition just inside Nankan Pass with the Great Wall of China in the background, 1928.

32. Roy Chapman Andrews and Walter Granger excavating dinosaur eggs at Erhlieu, Mongolia.

33. "The mongol men of Hat-in-Sumu prefer to listen to the radio signals being received by Hill. We are greatly indebted to the radio station at Cavidi, Philippines, who kindly sent us time signals twice a day and which we received remarkably well at a distance of two thousand miles." (Original expedition caption. The time signals were necessary for the Central Asiatic Expedition to calculate their exact position by the sun and stars. Mongolia, 1928.)

34. S. Harmsted Chubb in an elaborate rigging set up to photograph the back of a trotting horse for one of his osteological preparations.

35. A rare photograph showing Ellis Hughes, the Welshman who stole the Willamette meteorite, and his son. The meteorite—the largest ever found in the U.S.—rests on the handmade cart Hughes used to transport the meteorite to his own land.

36. The Willamette meteorite arriving at the Museum by horsedrawn cart. Note: the right wheels sinking into the roadway from the meteorite's immense weight.

PART TWO

THE GRAND TOUR

The Museum today is a very different place from the Museum of half a century ago. Now, high technology laboratories filled with computers and electronic equipment can be found next door to storerooms full of human mummies or snakes coiled in jars of alcohol. The collections are being cared for and studied in ways that Roy Chapman Andrews never dreamed of.

This next section of
Dinosaurs in the Attic
will take the reader on a grand armchair tour among the labs, vaults, and corridors of the Museum today. Along the way, we will often stop to chat with a curator, poke around in a storage room, or take a short excursion in space and time to the initial discovery of a particularly unusual specimen. Our first stop along this ramble will be the dinosaur bone storage room, certainly one of the more remarkable places in New York City—if not the world.

TEN

A Library of Bones

To get to the dinosaur bone storage room at the American Museum of Natural History, we must first descend to the main basement. Here, the labyrinthine route follows dim passageways lined with rumbling steam pipes. Off one of these corridors is a padlocked door, with a grubby sign taped to it that reads
DINOSAUR STORAGE ROOM
. The door opens into a large, starkly illuminated chamber. Stacks of metal shelves reach up into the gloom. Everywhere, we see bones. Huge dark bones shrouded in plastic lie on the shelves, while larger bones sit stacked on the floor or leaning against the wall. Slabs of rock containing twisted skeletons hang on the walls, and along the back of the room runs a workbench covered with dinosaur models, bones under study, and other odd-looking things. At the far end of the room and to the left, we see another door. Beyond this door is the basement to the Frick Building, a nine-story structure hidden in the center of the Museum's complex of buildings.

The Frick Building is the heart of vertebrate paleontology research in the Museum. The building was donated to the Museum by a corporation started by the millionaire Childs Frick. Frick, the Barnum Brown of fossil mammal collections, donated his outstanding collection to the Museum; later his corporation gave half of the ten-story building required to house it. Row upon row of green metal cabinets containing fossil vertebrates fill this basement room. But this is only a small fraction of the collection. Above it are seven floors of nothing but storage, comprising the largest collection of fossil mammals and dinosaurs in the world. The weight of this collection is so great that it would collapse a normal building; consequently the Frick Building was built with special steel reinforcing elements. On the top three floors are labs and offices.

In another area of the Museum—many winding passageways away from the dinosaurs—is the Whale Bone Storage Room. The whale collection is stored in an echoing, cavernous space that was once the Museum's powerhouse. Now, instead of massive generators, the room contains huge whale skulls and bones shrouded in plastic. The metal tracks and winches on the ceiling, once used for moving the giant machines, are now used for shifting the leviathans about. A peaceful light filters in through windows high on the walls, giving the room a hushed, mausoleumlike atmosphere.

But this is only the beginning. In a Museum attic, for example, rests the Elephant Room. Downstairs from that, one can find the tusk vault, the boar vault, and hundreds of metal cabinets containing the skeletons of everything from giraffes to shrews.

Moving even farther afield: in an office in the Anthropology Department stretch row upon row of cardboard boxes, all labeled and numbered, and each containing a human skull. Cabinets along the walls contain hanging human skeletons from all over the world.

Wherever one looks, there are bones—bird bones in the Ornithology Department, lizard and tortoise bones in Herpetology, fish bones in Ichthyology—bones from a large proportion of the vertebrate species on earth. Even the Museum's official logo shows two skeletons: those of a man and a horse.

If all the bones in the American Museum of Natural History were dumped into Central Park, they would form a pile well over three stories high and hundreds of feet in circumference. A
very
rough calculation indicates the pile would weigh at least 1,000 tons and contain about 50 million bones, representing the remains of more than 750,000 animals.

This mountain of bones has been gathered from every comer of the earth—from Outer Mongolia to East 59th Street. The people who brought this mountain together endured blizzards, sandstorms, bandits, and a host of other hardships. Some collectors even risked their lives or spent their personal fortunes in the effort. Almost all the bones—more than 99 percent—were collected for scientific purposes and are not on public display. More than two hundred scientists and their assistants conduct research in the Museum, much of which focuses on bones.

Why should such vast resources be devoted to collecting, cataloguing, storing, and caring for 50 million bones? Of what significance is this research?
Why study bones?
Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to visit one Museum scientist who does study bones: paleontologist Malcolm McKenna.

There can be no mistaking McKenna's office: boxes of fossil bones, all carefully labeled and numbered, cover most of the tables in the spacious room. McKenna himself has collected most of the specimens he studies, because such specimens are not present in the general collection. During his thirty-odd years in paleontology, McKenna has prospected for extremely rare fossils of early mammals just about everywhere—from Greenland to Patagonia.

McKenna brings out a plastic box filled with his recent finds, which look like so many tiny chips of stone. Early mammals were small, and these pieces are actually hundreds of minuscule fossil teeth, tiny jaws a quarter-inch in length, and other irregular bits of fossil bone. In all, the box holds less than two ounces of fossils. They date, McKenna says, from about 66 million years ago, and were discovered in Cretaceous beds at Lance Creek, Wyoming. This type of collection is more typical of the Museum today than in the past. Although they lack the glamour of the huge dinosaurs, in many ways they may actually be more important.