D-DAY ON THE PAINTED DESERT

TEXT BY LARRY L. MEYER PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF KIDA Unearthed at the Petrified Forest after 225 million years, the "oldest dinosaur ever found" may shed new light on the bizarre age of the terrible lizards...

Precisely at 6:06 A.M. on the sixth of June, 1985, the powerful Sikorsky helicopter kicked up a circular bowl of dust in its rise over Chinde Point. Fifty feet up, the chopper seemed to hover for a pensive moment. Then, with a receding, snorting racket, it pirouetted on the rose dawn air and darted down with a raven's swiftness to a low pocket near Lithodendron Wash and its historic rendezvous with prehistory.

Upward of 500 pairs of human eyes looked down from the Painted Desert promontory with more than casual inter-est. Below, a small group of men busied themselves with attaching something to a sling tethered to the chopper's underside. As a more-than-gentle and still chill south-eastern breeze jostled the greasewood around them, some watchers must have pondered this dramatic lesson in Heracli-tean philosophy and the theory of essen-tial and eternal change. The very Arizona ground they stood on, once gray and green, low and damp and prodigal, had become, over a journey of 225 million years in time and a northward meander of an estimated 1700 miles in latitude-not to mention land risings and slumpings and climate changes too numerous to recount-an earthscape now red and beige, high and dry and austere.

The Painted Desert: windswept plains and mesas, isolated buttes, and barren, usually dry river valleys. The vegetation patterns are desert scrub, plains grassland, and juniper-piñon woodland. Most of the rock within this arid deseriscape is part of the Chinle formation, deposited more than 200 million years ago. In addition to exhibiting a wide range of colors, it contains fossil records of extinct fish and a host of other animals, including the bones of the oldest dinosaur ever found.

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(LEFT) June 6, 1985: "Gertie," the earliest datable dinosaur-the size of a large dog-is removed from its 225-millionyear-old tomb in the brick-red siltstone 600 feet below Chinde Point in Petrified Forest National Park. (BELOW) Toilet paper and plaster-soaked burlap protect the Triassic Period bones, bound for study by specialists of the University of California-Berkeley. The find may help scientists flesh out the dim history of dinosaur evolution.

(LEFT) Scientists, graduate students, and National Park Service personnel grapple with the safely shrouded Gertie, whose remains were found in August, 1984. The creature lived here ages ago in dank tropical forest. (BELOW) A forklift decorated with a wooden dinosaur moves the treasured find to the cargo hold of a Sikorsky helicopter. The bones eventually will be returned to the park for display.

At 6:16 the Sikorsky lifted off the desert's floor a precious cargo-a 1200pound slab of Triassic earth and modern plaster that encased a fossil dinosaur fancifully named Gertie by its finders. Gently, temporarily, it deposited the load on Chinde Point. Polite, almost reverential applause from the spectators attended the delivery. Restraining ropes put up and patrolled by mounted rangers of Petrified Forest National Park were now lowered as the media representatives, in numbers befitting a general disarmament conference, moved in with their questions. Was Gertie really the oldest dinosaur ever found? Paleontologist Rob Long, the happy and gracious man of the hour, patiently explained that Gertie was actually a bundle of three, maybe four, dinosaur remains that ranged from the size of a rabbit to that of a Great Dane. One specimen may happen to be the oldest articulated dinosaur fossil ever found that could be dated with any degree of certainty. Just how old was it? About 225 million years-going back deep into the Upper Triassic Period, when amphibians and early socket-toothed reptiles called thecodonts ruled the soggy land. Dinosaurs were just making their presence known. It was a time of much change in life-forms, a major intersection of events in the evolutionary process. Did Long find the dinosaur himself? No, that honor went to Bryan Small, a young graduate student from Texas Tech University, who had been working with a mostly University of California-Berkeley and University of Colorado-Boulder crew of paleontologists the previous August, when the discovery was made. Where did the name Gertie come from? A 1912 animated film cartoon that featured a dinosaur character of that name. How could Long tell that Gertie was a female dinosaur? He couldn't. Only when many parts of many individuals are collected can paleonPaleontologists even hope to make sexual distinctions. When they can be made, the males tend to show more ornamentation-perhaps as a means to attract females. Was Gertie really a plateosaur, a black and white likeness of which had been put in the press kits? Rob Long suggested that the fourfooted, small-headed plateosaur could be the next of kin to Gertie-who just possibly might represent an entirely new genus and species. That determination, which would be made at Berkeley, might take six months. Then the find would be returned to Petrified Forest National Park for exhibit he hoped by the summer of 1986. What was the scientific importance of Gertie?

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Long saw the discovery refocusing sci-entific and popular attention from themuch discussed and puzzling disappear-ance of the dinosaurs to the relatively ne-glected question of their origins. Most par-ticularly, it would draw the attention ofscientists to Petrified Forest National Parkas the world's best place to view thebeginnings of the age of dinosaurs.

The morning warmed and coats andsweaters were shed. The television andstill cameras kept grinding and clicking incounterpoint to the questions, until RobLong excused himself to supervise the lastscene of the day's drama. A curious boy often or so had to be shooed out of thehelicopter's open cargo door. Then a fork-lift raised the prized package to where itcould be coaxed gently into the aircraft bymembers of the digging team. At 6:53 A.M.,the chopper lifted off and wheeled westto begin its two-day trip to Berkeley.

Lighters and briefly enjoyed an unaccus-tomed place in the spotlight of virtue. Afew flashlights materialized, one conve-niently located with the dispenser ofchampagne. Small boys tended red flaresin the outside patio. Park rangers pulledtheir cars up into a semicircle fronting thedarkened landmark and turned on theirheadlights and spotlights. Nice tries, butnot too effective.

Yet few left the odd gathering. Instead,scholars and merchants, public servantsand private citizens, excited children andrestless press stayed on, chatted in thestructure's dim nooks and crannies, theluckiest eating their delicious salmon-in-aspic, jumbo prawns, and giant strawber-ries off clean plates with knives and forks,the less fortunate, with their fingers, offsurreptitiously borrowed, already-usedplates; the least blessed waited for freshdinnerware and utensils that arrived justas most of the food ran out.

But why? What caused them to remain there so patiently for so long-particularly when the big event was obviously scheduled for very early risers? Perhaps they were on their best behavior because it was a time to learn. A piece of the puzzle had been found. Some must have wished merely to witness some new light shed on a divine plan. Still others were perhaps willing to make do with good and kindred company in lieu of answers, witnesses to another goad to their unre-solvable wonder. It had been a peculiarly genteel type of press conference. What did it all mean? What was Gertie to them or they to Gertie that they should fuss over her? Apparently a lot more than met the eye or ear-though hints had been there for the tak-ing the previous two evenings.

The night before the dinosaur hoist, theNational Park Service hosted a receptionat the historic Painted Desert Inn, a structure of attractive Pueblo style architecture that commands an enviable overlookof the Painted Desert floor less than a half-mile from where Gertie was to be raisedfrom her Triassic rest. Just as the dinner plates and silverwarein the still-long buffet line gave out, thelights suddenly went off. Power failure leftsome 300 guests of diverse age and background in the deep darkness of a moon-less Arizona night. Yet there was no commotion, no grumbling at all. Rather, conversation continued in the most unruffledfashion, with barely a midsentence pause.Unreformed smokers pulled out their Just as the dinner plates and silverwarein the still-long buffet line gave out, thelights suddenly went off. Power failure leftsome 300 guests of diverse age and back-ground in the deep darkness of a moon-less Arizona night. Yet there was no com-motion, no grumbling at all. Rather, con-versation continued in the most unruffledfashion, with barely a midsentence pause.Unreformed smokers pulled out their (OPPOSITE PAGE) Painted Desert Inn was built in 1924 as an Indian trading post. In 1975 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

(ABOVE) The dinosaur dubbed Gertie, partially reconstructed at the U of C-Berkeley.

(BELOW) Artist's rendering of the distinctive dinosaur specimen in its Triassic habitat.

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That the “terrible lizard” (as the word dinosaur translates literally) has a tight hold on the human imag-ination was also evident on the evening of June 4, 1985, the night before the black-out, when an unexpected crowd filled to overflowing the community of Hol-brook's recently converted courthouse-become-museum at a chamber of com-merce mixer. The party put paleontolo-gists and park rangers and sons and daugh ters of Holbrook's pioneers elbow to el-bow at the punch bowl and coffee urn; cattlemen and scholars and freckle-faced kids jockeyed for position at the chips and salsa table. Small-town America had turned out to meet a different and, one suspects, more enduring type of contemporary hero.

Ed Gastellum, superintendent of Petri-fied Forest National Park, took a bow, as did board members of the Petrified Forest Museum Association, which had funded much of the research. Then it was the turn of Berkeley's Rob Long to introduce his supporting cast: Bill Barry, chairman of U of C's Department of Paleontology; Howard Hutchinson, curator of the Berke-ley fossil collection (which, with hardly anyone's even knowing, ranks third in size behind the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Natural History); and museum scientist Mike Greenwald, a youngish-looking veteran of twenty years of digs.

Attendees applauded respectfully, impressed less by the scholarly company they were keeping than by what had been found in their own backyard. Its local value had already been made official in a bumper sticker that promoted Holbrook as “Dinosaur Country” and, less formally, in store windows, where homemade drawings had transformed a wimpy dog-size reptile into a fanciful and fearsome kin of the dread Tyrannosaurus rex.

Most of those present were surprised to learn of the old and honorable connection between Berkeley and the Painted Desert. In a tenuous way, it went back to John Muir, who had gathered a few fossil bones from the Petrified Forest in the winter and spring of 1905-06 that later found their way into the University of California collection. The tie was tightened in 1921 when young Charles L. Camp excavated 2000 pounds of fossil material from Blue Mesa and shipped it to Berkeley in thirty-one boxes.

Professor Camp became a regular at Petrified Forest over the next fourteen years, unearthing from the fossil-rich Chinle Formation amphibians such as the ponderous, ungainly carnivore Metopo-saurus, and what came to be his special fascination, the phytosaurs, big and ugly alligator-like reptiles that must have ruled the soggy Triassic shores. Camp also inspired other young paleontologists to comb the elevated and eroded Colorado Plateau, among them Samuel P. Welles, with whom he excavated from a single site in 1932 at least thirty-nine specimens of Placerias, a bulky rhinoceros-sized reptile.

It was Sam Welles who passed the torch to Rob Long when the young geology graduate of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, accompanied his Berkeley mentor to northeast Arizona in 1965. Long, who knew at age six he would grow up to be a paleontologist, ranks as one of those most fortunate human beings for whom their work becomes both their passion and their play. A born field man, he nevertheless did not shirk on his homework. He dutifully puzzled over thousands of disarticulated bone fragments Camp had collected but not described, trying to sort out which piece went with what beast. He read and annotated hundreds of pages of Camp's field notes, which he found not only comprehensive but poetic as well. He located negatives of photographs Camp had taken to illustrate his notes, printed them, and used them as a guide when he went to retrace the deceased man's footsteps.

It all paid off in 1981-82 when the group Long headed began a run of exciting discoveries in the Chinle Formation's bared mudstones and siltstones. Over the next four years, the five vertebrates Camp had collected in the Petrified Forest were augmented by about twenty-five more, of which a dozen were completely new species of reptiles or amphibians. Among the more bizarre was the plant-eating theco-dont Desmatosuchus haplocerus, four-teen crawling feet of crocodile-like armor plate with long sharp spines jutting out laterally from the neck area. Text continued from page 8 Desmatosuchus must have been off the menu of most of its Triassic contemporaries, but probably not that of nasty Lythrodynastes, a toothy twenty-foot-long meatloving thecodont that could move more quickly on its short and powerful hind legs.

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Long expects the fossil finds to accelerate over the next eighteen months as more paleontologists come to share his belief that the Petrified Forest is the best place in the world to view the Triassic Period. He adds that the park must contain a dozen doctoral theses for willing candidates. In addition to the vertebrates, the park has yielded more than 200 species of fossil plants, as well as prehistoric insects, snails, clams, and crayfish. Long is sure more awaits the skilled seekerparticularly in the category of microvertebrates.

place in the world to view the Triassic Period. He adds that the park must contain a dozen doctoral theses for willing candidates. In addition to the vertebrates, the park has yielded more than 200 species of fossil plants, as well as prehistoric insects, snails, clams, and crayfish. Long is sure more awaits the skilled seekerparticularly in the category of microvertebrates.

With characteristic grace, Long gives much of the credit for the local knowledge explosion to Professor Sidney Ash of Weber State College. (See "Visit the Triassic," page 36.) "Not only is Sid Ash the paleobotanist of the park, he knows far more about the geology of this area than anyone else. It looks like, through Sid's stratigraphic work from the basal sandstone on up, we'll be able to correlate the rocks of the southern part of the park with those of the Painted Desert area." (See photographs on page 42.) Behind the successes of Long and Ash, and between them and paleontological pioneers like Camp, stand a few major scientific breakthroughs that have breathed new life into the once-stunted disciplines of paleontology and geology. In the 1960s, the new theory of plate tectonics gave scientific sanction to an old and wrongly discredited theory of continental drift-that some 200 million years ago there was one supercontinent, which later broke into wandering slabs of lithosphere we know as the continents of today. Also, far better dating techniques have come to the aid of paleontologists, including the potassium-argon method, in which half the amount of the potassium 40 isotope decays over one billion 310 million years into known and measurable proportions of argon 40 and calcium 40. The resulting dates can be related to the types of ancient spores and pollens associated with the rock, then compared with already dated finds elsewhere in the world.

As a result of liberated thinking and increasingly sophisticated tools, paleontological knowledge has tripled in the last ten years, making it a brave new world of wonder about a less and less mysterious old world, in which many species competed for life in an environment far different from any we know.

The excitement at the Petrified Forest has spread along what is being called "The I-40 Connection." A cooperative agreement has park personnel working closely with the aborning New Mexico Museum of Natural History in Albuquerque and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, with emphasis on exhibiting and interpreting the newly found lifeforms. Though many miles off the eastwest axis of the interstate highway, research-minded Berkeley figures prominently in the agreement and will be reconstructing skeletons of four of the exotic creatures. Then the New Mexico museum will mold and cast their likenesses for display in simulated Triassic settings. A pleased David Gillette, curator of the new Albuquerque facility, credits Park Superintendent Ed Gastellum and Chief Ranger Chris Andress with taking the initiative in bringing the federal government, the academies, and the museums together in worthy common cause. In "payment," Petrified Forest National Park will receive copies of the models for its own interpretive exhibit, which, according to Gastellum, will be "a picture window into 225 million years ago," through which evolutionary changes in plants and animals can be seen clearly. "We can stretch our visitors' minds to see a landscape without grasses, without birds, without flowers."

At midafternoon on the sixth of June, press hawks and government officials had gone back to the present world of affairs, and the morning's onlookers had scattered to inspect the national park's better advertised wonders. Rob Long was back at it, doing what he

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does-and likes-best. In the bleak badlands of Blue Mesa, the previous day's uncovering of what appeared to be a phytosaur skull begged his attention.

With small picks and brushes, Long and a young associate knelt and carefully cleared dirt from around a briefcase-sized outcropping of fossilized bone. Ornery and hungry gnats, energized by the ninety-degree heat, swirled around them and the score of graduate students. Suppressed excitement rippled through the laconic exchanges between the fossil-philes as they brushed away their tormentors. With each practiced peck and sweep, the find looked less like a phytosaur.

"Well, what is it?" asked Chief Ranger Chris Andress, himself a devoted and proven fossil finder.

"Something big-maybe Placerias," Long responded, pointing to a rounded sweep of what might have been the tusk of the massive dicynodont.

Superintendent Gastellum showed up as the painstaking dig went deepermaybe fourteen inches down.

"Any idea yet?"

No, Rob Long declined to speculate further. He gave the word, and brawny Mike Greenwald went to work in the practiced rite of preserving the delicate fossil, as he had with Gertie. First, wet toiletpaper was applied to the exposed bone; plaster wraps were layed over it; then the wrap was left to harden before the small parcel of earth was lifted out.

Off to Berkeley the cast would go, its ancient contents not to be identified for two, three, maybe more months. That was one of the few drawbacks to the paleontological explosion, Long explained. There were so many in-the-field researchers that the hard fruit of their labors was piling up back in the museums, awaiting analysis and description. Indeed, some still jacketed fossils have reposed in museums for a hundred years and may by now have deteriorated beyond scholarly value.

That was a regret Rob Long, who has walked over half of Petrified Forest National Park's 147 square miles, did not wish to dwell on. As associates approached him with fossilized teeth, fragments of bone, pieces of armor plate, even the stone-hard droppings of long dead critters, Rob patiently identified them. Then, as though in need of some time by himself, he struck off alone over the gypsum-littered badlands in a northwest direction, perhaps to find another new species. It was, as he knew better than anyone else, a distinct possibility.

Success breeds success. Attention prompts pot-stirring speculation. Most recently the physicists and astronomers have entered the lists of explaining the long-puzzling cause of the dinosaur's demise. A provocative new theory attributes the death of dinosaurs and other sudden, yet periodic, extinctions of earth's life-forms to catastrophic visits by comets which, through collisions or close brushes, raise dust that blots out the sun. The causative agent of these destructive incidents is likewise a topic of hot debate. Is it old suspect planet X? Or a dim, unknown companion star to our sun? Or some hazard of the sun's wobbling journey through our solar system's Oort cloud of comets?

recently the physicists and astronomers have entered the lists of explaining the long-puzzling cause of the dinosaur's demise. A provocative new theory attributes the death of dinosaurs and other sudden, yet periodic, extinctions of earth's life-forms to catastrophic visits by comets which, through collisions or close brushes, raise dust that blots out the sun. The causative agent of these destructive incidents is likewise a topic of hot debate. Is it old suspect planet X? Or a dim, unknown companion star to our sun? Or some hazard of the sun's wobbling journey through our solar system's Oort cloud of comets?

Rob Long and his associates greet these intrusions into what was once their neardead and too-drab discipline with wide smiles. While the outside attention is flattering, and the conjecture is intellectually stimulating, they remain skeptical. Besides, those who have come to the Painted Desert in June to study the matter have their own, earthier explanation: prehistoric gnats killed the dinosaurs.