Magic Tooth and the Dinosaurs
The
Crow Indians may have thought that the strange white man was
magical. Six Crow chiefs who had been invited to breakfast
at his campsite had seen him take his teeth out, clean them,
and put them back into his head! After that the white man
was known as “Magic Tooth.”
Perhaps a man with that kind of magic wouldn’t die from the heat or get lost in the maze of canyons and dark spires that twisted their way across the prairie. Maybe the clouds of gnats wouldn’t bite his skin raw. Maybe he would find the fossilized bones and teeth he was looking for. And maybe the Sioux chief Sitting Bull wouldn’t move in his direction with the thousands of warriors who had just destroyed General Custer’s army to the south.
False teeth didn’t give Professor Edward Cope any magical powers. Cope understood the dangers that faced his expedition in the wilderness. But he imagined the badlands as they might have looked a hundred million years ago. He saw a time when dinosaurs ruled.
He knew that a vast ocean once covered the land here, with eight-hundred-pound fish that had jaws as big as a grizzly bear’s, fifty-foot creatures called plesiosaurs, and fierce swimming animals called mosasaurs. He planned to find fossils of these animals and other creatures that no one had ever seen.
So, in the summer of 1876, Cope set out from the Missouri River with two fellow fossil hunters, Charles Sternberg and J.C. Isaac. They headed for Dog Creek Valley in the middle of the Montana badlands, planning to hunt dinosaurs.
Sternberg wrote that in Helena “the news was fresh from the battlefield, of Custer and the men who had followed him to death. The Professor was strongly advised against the folly of going.”
But Cope reasoned that now was the best time to go, since Sitting Bull and the Sioux warriors would be away from the area. He thanked the army officers who had given him the warning and waited a day for an order forbidding him to leave. When it didn’t come, Cope bought horses, hired a cook and a scout, and left for Dog Creek.
As Cope and his party wandered on horseback through the hot canyons of black shale, he told Sternberg of an ancient, vanished world.
“He pictured the land as it must have been at the time of the dinosaurs, when the shale was mud on an ocean floor,” Sternberg wrote.
Cope described forty-foot creatures with snouts like ducks’ bills and larger animals with daggerlike teeth. At night, Cope’s visions often turned into night-mares. He tossed and turned in his sleep.
After a few weeks at Dog Creek, Cope had found some fossils but couldn’t find the complete skeletons he had hoped for. “We found no complete specimens,” Sternberg wrote, “but we came upon localities filled with scattered bones and teeth.” The men decided to break camp at Dog Creek and look elsewhere.
This meant hauling their wagon, horses, and precious fossils up twelve hundred feet of crumbly shale to the prairie. Just as they finished this fourteen-hour ordeal, their scout, Jim Deer, rode up with bad news: Sitting Bull was only a day’s march away. The smart thing to do was to head back to the military post at Fort Benton.
Cope wouldn’t hear of it. Sternberg and Isaac agreed to stay, but “the scout and our valiant cook had concluded that their precious scalps were too valuable to risk,” Sternberg wrote, and the two men headed for the fort. Professor Cope, Sternberg, and Isaac traveled forty miles to a valley near a place called Cow Island and set up a new camp.
During their stay at Cow Island, all their hard work was rewarded with a treasure: they discovered a giant skull in an eroding canyon wall. “The Professor found here the first specimen ever discovered in America of the wonderful horned dinosaurs,” Sternberg wrote.
The skull had two small horns that poked up over each eye socket and a large horn that projected from the nose. The whole skull was rimmed with a curved shield. From the size of the skull, the men estimated that the entire creature had been more than twenty feet long. They had found a relative of Triceratops.
By the end of the summer, Cope and his companions had collected three tons of fossils. In October they loaded their precious cargo onto a steamship and headed for home.
Twenty-one new species of dinosaurs would eventually be named from the fossils Cope had discovered. He knew, as the steamer churned through the waters of the Missouri River, that this was only the beginning. The bones of even stranger creatures were just waiting to be found.
