So far nobody knows what the 28-inch scapula Rob Peterson found in South Dakota belongs to. Three years ago the Clarendon Hills native spotted a tiny bit of bone poking out of a claylike deposit at the bottom of a hill in Harding County. It was the first day of the digging season, his second summer guiding fossil hunters for Paleo Prospectors, a commercial outfit that takes amateur paleontologists to privately owned properties out west to look for dinosaur bones and other fossils. He knew the particular spot of earth he was looking at didn’t have the usual geologic features that signal the presence of dinosaur bones. But just two years earlier his friend Rob Sula (no relation to me) had found a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex claw in the same area, so Peterson had learned to look everywhere.
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Nicklas, who’s led these expeditions for seven years, has been digging for fossils since he was a kid growing up near the Red Hill deposit in Pennsylvania, known for its Devonian fish and amphibian fossils. “By the time I was seven,” he says, “I’d switched to archaeology.” He’d seen the Roman Colosseum on a family trip around the world, and that was it. In 1978, while studying archaeology at the University of London and doing his fieldwork in the Middle East, he took a job with a contract archaeology firm based in Georgia that did survey work for government projects. In the mid-80s he started a company called Put Your Future in Ruins, which reproduced archaeological artifacts for hotels and museums, and he defrayed the cost of his trips to Egypt by leading archaeological tours.
In 1996 Nicklas, who still lives in Georgia, led his first six paying clients onto privately owned ranches in the Hell Creek Formation, a sedimentary deposit that covers vast areas of Montana, northeastern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas. It’s loaded with fossils from the late Cretaceous, the period just before dinosaurs disappeared: tyrannosaurs, raptors, crocodiles, turtles, the “ostrich mimic” struthiomimus, and hadrosaurs–dull-witted herbivores called the “cows of the Cretaceous” for their ubiquity. Whole skeletons are rarely discovered, but pieces can be found everywhere sticking out of the eroding earth.
Peterson’s and Sula’s homes in the western suburbs are now filled with bones. Sula collects enough good ones to occasionally sell or trade on his own. Peterson hasn’t sold any of his, but he’s been known to trade them for beer and always carries a few in the trunk of his car to give away. On the night he met his girlfriend in a jazz club he took her out to his car and wooed her with fossils.
The record-setting $8.36 million the Field paid for Sue only aggravated the problems between academic and commercial paleontologists. Academics say that once unscrupulous collectors saw they could command such staggering prices, poaching on federal lands shot up. They also complain that more important finds now go to the highest bidders instead of to scientists.
Nicklas argues that his methods are head and shoulders above those of most commercial collectors and even of some scientists. He has an archaeology degree, and on scientifically important digs he uses standard archaeological field method to keep track of exactly how an animal is positioned in the ground, so that researchers can understand the context in which it was found. He also says that he’s helping scientists by keeping important finds in the public realm. If it turns out that he does have a full rex on his hands, he plans to sell it to a museum “for a very reasonable price.” He’s donated or loaned important finds to museums in the past–Peterson’s scapula spent several years in a Georgia nature center.
