The Dinosaur Mummy
In
1908 Charles H. Sternberg and his three sons hunted big
game in Wyoming. They were not worried that their prey,
a three-horned dinosaur called Triceratops, had been
dead for more than sixty-five million years. Long-dead dinosaurs
made perfect prey for these experienced fossil hunters.
After searching all summer, they found their prize in August. But an unexpected discovery was even more exciting: the fossilized remains of a mummified dinosaur. Charles described it as “the crowning specimen of my life work!”
At that time, Charles had already been collecting fossils for forty years. His fascination with fossils had started early. As a boy in frontier Kansas of the 1860s, he found fossil leaves and imagined the giant forests that had produced them millions of years before.
He
later wrote that he had decided on his adventurous career
at the age of seventeen: “I made up my mind what part
I should play in life, and determined that whatever it might
cost me in privation, danger, and solitude, I would make
it my business to collect facts from the crust of the earth.”
There was plenty of hardship, danger, and loneliness to
go around on the Wyoming expedition.
The Sternbergs discovered a Triceratops skull near Schneider Creek, and prepared it for shipment to the British Museum of Natural History. By then they were low on food and supplies. They were also sixty-five miles from Lusk, the nearest town.
Charles and one of his sons, Charlie, got the horse and wagon hitched and ready to take the skull to Lusk. As they prepared to leave, another son, George, found some interesting bones sticking out of a high ridge of sandstone.
They didn’t want to risk not finding the site again or not having time to excavate the bones before the end of the summer. Charles suggested that George and Levi, who was fourteen, stay and start uncovering the new bones. Meanwhile, Charles and Charlie would take the skull into town and bring back food.
George and Levi began removing the tons of rock that had protected the remains of the giant dinosaur for so long. The work was hot and exhausting.
After a few days, they didn’t even have enough flour to make bread or biscuits. They did have a few old potatoes, which they boiled and ate a little at a time. The excitement of seeing the dinosaur emerge from the rock kept them going.
By the end of three days, they had uncovered the animal to its breastbone. The dinosaur lay on its back with its ribs and legs sticking up.
George carefully lifted a huge piece of sandstone off the chest and stared at the fossil in wonder. “I realized that here, for the first time, a skeleton of a dinosaur had been discovered wrapped in its own skin,” he wrote later.
The
dinosaur had died in a protected place, untouched by predators.
Its body had then dried out and become a natural mummy.
Scientists think that a flash flood later carried it to
its final resting place and quickly covered it with mud
and sand. Over the millennia, water-borne minerals fossilized
the bones and replaced the dried flesh with rock, creating
a fossil in the exact shape of the mummy.
In two more days, George and Levi had exposed an area twelve feet wide, fifteen feet long, and ten feet deep. They were now very hungry and low on water. On the fifth day, their father and brother returned. The first thing Charles asked was, “What luck?”
George barely had time to grab some food from the wagon before he led his father to the dig site to show him what he had found. He was rewarded by his father’s look of amazement on seeing the fossil.
Charles said, “This is a finer fossil than I have ever found. And the only thing which would have given me greater pleasure would have been to have discovered it myself.”
A fine fossil it was. The skeleton was almost complete. Only the rear feet and tail had eroded away. The rock imprint of the skin showed that the creature was not scaly, as many scientists had guessed. Instead, it was covered with bumps, which are called tubercles. Long tendons in the neck had bent the head back under the body in a “death pose” that is typical for dinosaurs. The front legs had three large hooves on each foot.
The Sternbergs later found another example nearby of the same kind of dinosaur, a species of duck-billed plant eater that is now called Edmontosaurus annectens. Fossilized pine needles, bark, and pinecones discovered near its stomach may be the remains of its last meal.
The first of the Sternbergs’ “mummified” specimens of Edmontosaurus is still on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Charles Sternberg hunted fossils for many more years. His sons continued for years after that. But none of them ever found another skeleton that so clearly showed what dinosaurs may have looked like and how they lived more than sixty-five million years ago.
