The explorers first look at yellowstone the morning of ju july 16. collecting fossils on the northern peaks of the range they look south to see the yellowstone river winding through the valley in the distance. they knew they had arrived. and with the snowy mountain peaks in the runoff the yellowstone river is the lifeblood of the park. nearly 700 miles from and to and the longest free flowing
there are some people in this profession that really, truly believe that it is, there s something morally wrong with selling a fossil. i was indoctrinated as an undergrad, that if you don t have a ph.d, you have no right to a collect dinosaurs. and i heard about them. phi and peter larson collecting fossils and i was told, these are pirates! and i visited pete larson and i visited the black hills institute. and they weren t pirates at all. they had techniques they taught my crew. they were better than my crew. you have academias and these fiefdoms. and now here s these really great paleontologists that don t need that system. back in the day in the early 1900s commercial directors, quote unquote, were filling museums with pesmspecimens and hand in hand with, quote, academic people. that was an okay relationship. around in the 70s and 80s, that changed. 1980s, we re already seeing this schism between professional commercial collectors versus professional research collectors.
Trying to figure out how to proceed. there s a real mass of bones here. some are caught up in concretion, but most appear to be really excellently preserved. and i believe that the tail s going that way and the skull is going this way, but we re just going to have to dig it up and see. collecting fossils is something that s very timely. fossils are discovered because they re weathering out, because the forces of nature, rain, winds, freezing, thawing, even snowfall, have an effect on that fossil.
the indictments were an avalanche of charges. and it was just a massive document and it looked like a death blow to the institute. the government went just nuts or something, you know? i guess they just threw everything in and hoped something would stick. if you add up the time served for each of those counts, it comes to 353 years for me, which is longer than jeffrey dahmer was sentenced to prison for. and he killed and ate like 13 people. you know, it doesn t make sense. a lot of these accusations are things we know were legal. 38 felony indictments for collecting fossils? it totally blew me apart. i m used to fixing things, and this was unfixable. it was so stupid. once you start to understand the indictments, basically this is what they said. pretend we re in wyoming and we re standing in the middle of the prairie and let s assume for a moment that the fence is in the right place. you re standing on this side of the fence, the government says, right over there, on the