The discovery of the bones of a large meat-eating dinosaur embedded in a bluff in Montana has set off a legal confrontation between a family of cattle ranchers and a group of paleontologists who are backed by federal and state officials.
The dispute escalated on Friday when agents of the paleontologists discovered some ranchers trying to dig up the dinosaur bones with an earth-moving machine. In the ensuing confrontation, one of the ranchers brandished a rifle and warned of possible bloodshed.The local sheriff and the U.S. attorney's office then intervened. The ranchers complied with an order to cover up the fossil and leave the site.
Large dinosaur fossils command large prices, and the Montana dispute is the latest in a series of battles for these valuable legacies of the Cretaceous Period.
The land in question, several dozen acres near Fort Peck, Mont., belonged to a family named Walton for more than a century, one family member, Fred Walton, said in an interview. "We've been around a long time," Walton said. "One of our ancestors was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. How would you like it if the government came in and told you what you could do or not do with your land?"
The trouble is that the family came upon hard times some years ago and lost the land in a foreclosure by a Department of Agriculture agency, which apparently owns it now, although it may face a legal challenge.
Meanwhile, a paleontologist at the University of Notre Dame, J. Keith Rigby Jr., unaware of the foreclosure, got the permission of one branch of the bitterly divided Walton family, as well as a permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service, to search for dinosaurs on the land.
Rigby teaches at Notre Dame, but in the summer he leads volunteers from Earthwatch, a Boston-based nonprofit organization, on dinosaur hunts. The volunteers, who pay to participate, are taught the rudiments of fossil hunting.
"During past seasons, we found the leg of a large hadrosaur in the vicinity, so we returned for further exploration this summer after getting permission from the Waltons," Rigby said in an interview. "In July, four volunteers literally stumbled over some badly weathered bones and insisted that we start digging.
"What we found was a meat-eating dinosaur with a jaw some seven feet long," he said. "If it's a kind of tyrannosaur, it's probably the largest one ever found. It may be another type of carnivore, but whatever it is, it's an enormously important discovery."
Rigby's group, which employed members of the Walton family to help run the camp, decided to postpone full-scale excavation until next year. It put protective plaster jackets around the exposed bones and reburied them.
But last Friday, the owner of a local bar noticed that some Walton family members had sent a backhoe to the dinosaur site and were digging it up. The bar owner notified Rigby in South Bend, Ind., who in turn arranged to, as he put it, "halt the vandalism."
Walton said that his family had, in fact, paid back a loan from the Farmers Home Administration, a branch of the Department of Agriculture now known as the Farm Service Agency, but had not been credited with the repayment. The Waltons, he said, therefore have a legitimate claim to the land.
Walton acknowledged his attempt to wrest the dinosaur fossil from the land. "We need food for our families and fuel for our machines," he said. "Those people at Earthwatch say it's a nonprofit outfit, but Rigby and those people earn money to pay their mortgages and put food on their tables, don't they? Is it fair that the landowner gets nothing?"
Rigby expressed sympathy for the Waltons, and called their attempt to seize the fossil "an act of desperation."
Roger Bergen, president of Earthwatch, said that the legal problems had made it uncertain whether the excavation could be resumed. "The fossil was destined to be the centerpiece of a museum planned for Fort Peck," he said. "But without it, the museum may not be built."