MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-08-20 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] More Brooklyn Texas Connections - This time Pre-historic
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Here is a good way to hide dinosaur tracks: Wait tens of millions of
years while the footsteps fossilize under a shallow sea that will later
become Texas, dig up the tracks just before World War II, put plaster
around the sides, paint the whole thing a whimsical muddy red, take it
to Brooklyn and bolt it to a classroom wall with an unadorned case.
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Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Wayne G. Powell, chairman of the geology department at Brooklyn College,
with the track of an Acrocanthosaurus, top, and a larger one from a
Pleurocoelus. Scientists thought the block was a replica.
By accident, this method worked until just this summer for Roland T.
Bird, a Harley-riding excavator who called himself a dinosaur hunter.
When Brooklyn College started renovating its lecture halls in May,
scientists began packing what they had assumed was a case containing a
plaster cast of dinosaur tracks, a teaching tool held in such regard
that it was often obscured by a projector screen.
Removing the case, they found that the block on the wall of Room 3123,
so phony-looking it could be mistaken for something carbon-frozen in
"The Empire Strikes Back," was a real rock embedded with tracks more
than 100 million years old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and
holding immense archaeological value.
"It was there all the time," said Wayne G. Powell, the chairman of the
geology department, who was among the scientists removing the block from
the wall. "It really never occurred to us that it could possibly be
real."
Up three flights of stairs, behind a wooden door marked Geology Lecture
Room, with the words Please Lock the Door underneath, the rock is found.
It stands 55 inches high and 32 inches across.
A worker was laying a coat of epoxy on the floor yesterday, and the room
smelled like the makings of a headache. The college has enlisted the
American Museum of Natural History for help in removing the rock to
clean it and put it back on display, but there are other considerations.
Classes start in two weeks.
Considering what it has already been through, though, the rock can be
called a survivor. No marker described its provenance, and those who
knew what it was had died or moved on over the years. It also was able
to hide in plain sight for decades largely because of changes in
curatorial sensibilities The scientists who installed it in the 1940's
would never have thought to tell anyone it was real; that would be like
telling people your hair is real.
Their latter-day counterparts would never imagine treating a rare fossil
so cavalierly as to, for starters, paint it.
Mr. Powell, who describes his specialty as "not dinosaurs," removed the
rock's case at the close of the spring semester with a paleontology
professor, John Chamberlain, and a student, Matt Garb. Because real
dinosaur tracks are hard to come by, colleges and museums routinely
display replicas, and the rock looked like one, partly because plaster
was visible on its side.
Behind the case, though, written in pencil on the wall, they found the
name R. T. Bird and the date, presumably of its installation, of May 16,
1942. Mr. Garb recognized the name, and the men got a copy of Mr. Bird's
memoir, "Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter."
In the book, Mr. Bird, who dropped out of junior high school and worked
as a cowboy before barnstorming the country on his motorcycle showing
archaeological finds for the American Museum of Natural History,
described discoveries in the limestone around the Paluxy River near Glen
Rose, Tex. The trackways there, now famous as the site where some
creationists claim human footprints were laid contemporaneously with
dinosaur tracks, have been preserved as Dinosaur Valley State Park, so
fossils can no longer be removed.
But back in the late 1930's and early 1940's, Mr. Bird was making up his
own rules. In his memoir, he described the way he and Erich Schlaikjer,
an assistant professor of geology from Brooklyn College, distributed the
blocks of tracks. He wrote: "Erich came up with a proposal. 'And I'd
like one of the smaller ones for Brooklyn College.' "
Mr. Schlaikjer got his wish, bolted to the wall of the lecture hall and
painted the same reddish-brown color bones that usually appear in
history museums.
"They probably wanted tracks to match the bones," Mr. Powell said.
Kathleen Kovach, a facilities worker at the college, said, "That's more
decorating than curating."
There are two tracks in the rock, a shallow one a couple of feet across
and a deeper, narrower one the shape of a crescent. Based on the kinds
of tracks common to the Paluxy River bed, the scientists at Brooklyn
College said the big one was probably made by a Pleurocoelus, a 20-ton
herbivore that has been named the Texas state dinosaur. The smaller one
may have come from an Acrocanthosaurus, a sharp-toothed monster
Pleurocoeluses sought to avoid meeting in dark cretaceous alleys.
Mr. Bird would have his own ideas about the tracks' origins, and would
know why they had painted the rock, bolted it to the wall and lined it
with plaster. But he died a long time ago, and left only scattered hints
of the way he had lived.
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