Hunting down T. rex in the Badlands

Don’t talk to Don and Kathy Wilkening about the movie “Jurassic Park.” The same goes for TLC or Discovery Channel programs that show paleontologists unearthing a completely intact dinosaur skeleton with the swing of a pickax and the swipe of a finishing brush.

“It’s not three brushstrokes and into the Smithsonian,” said Don, who along with his wife hosts weekend and weeklong classes at the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum here. “That’s not real paleontology.”

Real paleontology is 10-hour days in 95-degree heat, digging at a promising site that you hope holds some remnants of an ancient turtle shell and coming up empty. Real paleontology is carrying 160 pounds of coprolite — that’s fossilized dino dung — down the steep slope of a butte on a stretcher.

And real paleontology is what you get if you sign up for Pioneer Trails’ field classes held during the summer in the Badlands of North Dakota, a state better known for its unforgiving winters, rolling wheat fields and unending miles of treeless flatlands than it is for fossils.

But in Bowman County, on the southwestern edge of the state, the topography resembles the deserts of Arizona and Mexico. The buttes here seem planted into the ground, and they give this part of the country a singular landscape.

If you are looking for a fun learning experience, this sliver of the Badlands is the place to be. Although some people may think digging in the sand in 90-degree weather is not much of a vacation, it was just what my wife, Heather, and I had been looking for. Heather is a third-grade teacher and thought the field school would make her better able to teach students about topography, geography and, of course, dinosaurs.

We drove from our hometown of Omaha, Neb., to Rapid City, S.D., late last June, stayed overnight and headed north to Bowman the next day. Looking at a map, drivers may suspect the few labeled dots between Rapid City and Bowman are actual towns with actual services. But many are only a house and a shed or, as in one case, a house and a field of hundreds of junked cars.

The three-hour drive along U.S. 85 is all rolling hills and seemingly empty wheat fields. It’s scenic for those who like wide-open spaces and the occasional white-tailed deer running alongside the highway. For us, the drive turned tedious after the first couple of hours. Once we saw the first butte sticking out of the landscape, however, we knew we were close to Bowman.

The town of about 1,800 residents is a crossroads for truck drivers hauling grain, oil and minerals from the region. Bowman County sits atop the Williston Basin, which is rich in oil and gas reserves and ranks as one of the top oil- and gas-producing counties in the state.

But it wasn’t black gold that Heather and I were hunting. The buttes — composed of sand, stone and clay, twisted by wind and water, and tinted shades of red, brown, orange, yellow and green — hold more than just minerals and oil. They also contain tens of millions of years worth of history, more than 65 million years, in fact. It was about that long ago when a catastrophic event — most likely a meteorite that struck Earth — wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals.

Here in Bowman County, much of what lived before the event is buried in the buttes. Fossil diggers can see when the theoretical cataclysm happened because the landscape is separated by the K-T Boundary, a line in the sand that splits the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. (The “K” comes from the German form of the word “Cretaceous.”) Anything above is less than 65 million years old; anything below is older.

Plants can grow and fossils of mammals can be found above the boundary. Below are the remains of plants and dinosaurs, such as the imposing Tyrannosaurus rex. A T. rex vertebra was what the nine of us — Don, Kathy, five other amateur diggers and Heather and I — were after on the first day of our three-day field school.

Millions of fossils

We headed to a site in Hell Creek — a formation of buttes just north of Rhame, N.D., about a 20-minute drive from Bowman.

Long ago, the Sioux Indians named the area makoshika, meaning “bad land.” For good reason. In summer, the temperatures here exceed 90 degrees. Rain is rare, and the wind bounces off the buttes and whips up dust.

The desolate landscape does not easily forgive missteps, and I realized my first at the outset of our first day. Field school is hot, sweaty work, and in an effort to travel light, I hadn’t packed a hat or sunglasses. The Wilkenings had given us a list of essential items to pack, but I hadn’t followed it closely enough.

We headed up a road that was really just two tracks leading to nowhere. After parking in a field, we trekked for about 15 minutes lugging all sorts of tools — pickaxes, shovels, brushes and buckets. Then Don pointed out a suitable spot among the buttes and we started digging.

The sand floor of the Badlands is several feet to several hundred feet below the surface grass, and out of this sand bottom rise hundreds of buttes that hold millions of fossils.

When dinosaurs roamed the area 65 million years ago, North Dakota was about one degree north of the equator and near an ocean. Temperatures were high and moisture was plentiful, Kathy said. “It was very wet, hot and humid,” she said, and full of aquatic animals. We didn’t have the humidity, but there was still the heat.

Don told Heather and me to start excavating the side of a butte. The rest of the group — a father-son team from Minneapolis, a woman from Des Moines, a paleontology student from Minot, N.D., and a French student who makes the annual pilgrimage from Paris to dig in the sand here — went around a corner and started excavating.

They had more luck than we did. After about four hours of digging, we’d found nothing more than sand. No turtle shell, no T. rex, no Smithsonian.

“That’s paleontology,” Don said, telling us he would often dig for days without finding as much as a sliver of a shell.

Not having as much patience, Heather and I decided to seek something more fulfilling and left Don to help the others with a T. rex vertebra they had found. Seven of us knocked away most of the hard clay, sand and shale surrounding the bone with pickaxes and shovels, then wielded more delicate brushes, being careful not to harm the fossil.

It took 10 backbreaking hours, with a long pause for a picnic provided by Don and Kathy, to remove most of the sand, shale and clay from around T. rex and lay plaster around the bone to protect it from the weather and any animals looking for a 65-million-year-old snack.

That accomplished, Heather and I headed back to the Super 8 Motel to recover. My body ached as it hadn’t in years, and shaking off all the sand was a challenge. I was asleep by 8 after we dined on burgers and shakes at the Eats ‘n Treats restaurant and took a trip to the convenience store to buy a hat and sunglasses.

Both of us were sore the next morning, but with so many dinosaur bones left out there, we were eager to start the day and arrived at the museum by 8 a.m.

The second day proceeded much like the first, but it was not as intense, because temperatures had cooled and the work wasn’t as hard. Besides, it was a lot more fun because of the large number of fossils we found.

Our lucky strike came at a Hell Creek “microsite,” where the tiny bones of thousands of small creatures settled after their riverine habitat dried up. Although most people think of dinosaurs as giants that roamed the Earth eating everything in sight, the food chain had to start somewhere; it was the bones of these bottom-feeders we sought.

I thought I wouldn’t fancy the microsite but was thrilled to uncover fish vertebrae and teeth no bigger than a pencil eraser. If I hadn’t been shown what to look for, I would have stepped on them or dismissed them as pebbles. Yes, they were indeed fossils, Don assured us.

The nine of us on the dig that day found hundreds of bones — although the whole lot was carried back to the museum in two gallon-size Ziploc bags. (Vertebrate fossils found on state or federal land can’t be removed without a permit. On privately owned land, the landowner’s permission is needed.)

The bones and most of the artifacts would be categorized and stored in the museum’s temperature-and-light-controlled rooms until Don, Kathy or another paleontologist could sift through them.

Chance of a lifetime

Our third day was the most exciting. We were taken to a more remote site where Don and Kathy had dug out a piece of T. Rex coprolite.

First, we plastered the fossilized waste of the flesh-eating dinosaur to ensure that no damage would come to it on the trip back to the museum. Then, five of us lifted the pile, which was heavy and awkward because of its size and shape — about 4-by-2 1/2 feet in diameter — onto a stretcher. That was the easy part.

Getting it down the 70-degree slope of the butte was another story. But, feeling like true paleontologists, we found a way, slipping and sliding down the side of the butte and across a stream before stowing it in the back of a waiting truck.

Although hauling animal waste may not be considered a feat by some, in the world of paleontology, it’s cause for celebration. “Only a handful of people get to do what you just did,” Don said.

And the day just got better. We dug for fossilized leaves, well-preserved in the hard clay and looking as if they had been formed last year instead of 65 million years ago. We were allowed to keep some of these, the only time during the weekend we were permitted to do so. As for the other fossils we found, some will end up in museum displays, others in the trash. But all of them will be part of this fossil hunter’s happy memories.

Dinosaur digs

GETTING THERE:

From LAX, United and Northwest have connecting service (change of plane) to Bismarck, N.D., about 180 miles northeast of Bowman. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $337.

From Bismarck, drive west on Interstate 94, then exit onto U.S. 85 South.

Rapid City, S.D., is about 175 miles south of Bowman. Northwest, Delta and United have connecting service (change of plane) to the city. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $338.

From Rapid City, drive north on U.S. 85 for three hours. It’s a long drive, but the scenery is beautiful at times. Don’t forget to fuel up before departing Rapid City, because there are few places with services on the way.

WHERE TO STAY:

Bowman has plenty of economy lodgings.

North Winds Lodge, 503 U.S. Highway 85 South; (888) 684-9463 or (701) 523-5641. Doubles $40-$55. Some field school participants stayed at this small hotel on the edge of town. They said that it was homey and welcoming and that the service and cleanliness were good.

Super 8 Motel, 408 S. 3rd Ave. S.W.; (701) 523-5613, https://www.super8.com . We stayed here because you always know what you’re getting with a Super 8. The manager was friendly — as was everybody else we met in Bowman. Doubles $60-$66.

El-Vu Motel, 409 U.S. Highway 85 South; (800) 521-0379 or (701) 523-5224. Doubles $44-$47.

WHERE TO EAT:

Big J’s Family Restaurant, 116 S. Main St.; (701) 523-3311. Serves hamburgers, sandwiches, shrimp, steak, fish, chicken-fried steaks, soups and salads. Dinner entrees $6.49-$9.49.

Eats ‘n Treats, 408 U.S. Highway 12 West; (701) 523-3162. Serves hamburgers, chicken, sandwiches, salads, soups and ice cream. Dinner specials $4-$7.

Long Pines Steakhouse, 13 1st Ave. N.E.; (701) 523-5201. Serves steaks, hamburgers, chicken melts, Cajun chicken, walleye, halibut, lobster tail. Dinners $5.50-$30.

FIELD SCHOOL:

Pioneer Trails Regional Museum, 12 1st Ave. N.E., Bowman, ND 58623; (701) 523-3625, https://www.ptrm.org . A three-day course is $200 per person, $400 per person for a week, including continental breakfasts and picnic lunches, and transportation to and from the fossil sites. This year’s weeklong field school is July 25-30; weekend field schools June 24-26, July 9-10 and Aug. 6-8.

TO LEARN MORE:

Bowman Area Chamber of Commerce, 13 1/2 E. Divide, Bowman, ND 58623; (701) 523-5880, https://www.bowmannd.com .

North Dakota Tourism, P.O. Box 2057, Bismarck, ND 58503; (800) HELLO-ND (435-5663) or (701) 328-2525, https://www.ndtourism.com .

— Tony C. Dreibus