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Woodland Park, Colo., Hangs Tourist Hopes on Proposed Dinosaur Fossil Museum

Posted on: Monday, 28 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

Jul. 27--ROUNDUP, Mont. In a setting only a rattlesnake could love, Michael Triebold and his workers have spent months chipping away at hardened sandstone trying to unearth a rare treasure.

Deep in the rock are fossils of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, one of only two found. It likely died near this spot about 67 million years ago, possibly killed by a pack of other carnivorous dinosaurs.

To Triebold, a renowned fossil hunter who sells his finds to the world's major museums, the juvenile T. Rex is one of the biggest discoveries of his career.

To his hometown of Woodland Park, it may mean more.

City officials plan a major downtown face-lift and want dinosaurs to lead the way.

Triebold is building the $3.5 million Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center off U.S. Highway 24 that will feature fossils, numerous displays and a working laboratory.

The facility will be the centerpiece of the downtown's revitalization -- an effort by city officials to change Woodland Park from a pass-through town for motorists heading to Cripple Creek or ski resorts into a tourist destination.

Triebold expects 100,000 visitors a year at the 18,500-square-foot center.

City officials hope for more visitors.

It is an ambitious gamble for Triebold, 50, who may get a $250,000 reimbursement from the city for placing the center downtown. Most of the money is coming from his own pocket.

"I'm scared as hell," Triebold said. "But this isn't the first time I've done something this risky."

For most of his adult life, Triebold worked in radio in Kansas and North Dakota -- as a disc jockey, ad salesman and engineer. One day in 1989 he quit, telling his wife he wanted to dig fossils, like when he was a kid on his parents' North Dakota farm.

"She cried," he said. "She thought I had lost my marbles. But I had decided I wanted to do what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, not what I was told to do."

While digging fossils, Triebold worked second jobs for extra money -- from flying crop-dusters to shooting birds away from sunflower crops. All the while, he kept digging and piecing together skeletons.

In 1992, Triebold made his name in the paleontology world by reconstructing a three-dimensional skeleton of Xiphactinus -- a 12 1/2-foot long ancient fish.

The job was delicate and time-consuming. He removed a pile of miniscule fossils jumbled together in stone, made casts of them and built a full skeleton of the rare fossil.

"No one had ever done that before," he said. "And no one has ever done it since because it's so much work. That got us known as paleontologists."

He sold the skeleton to a Japanese museum.

In 1994, he found the most bones ever discovered of a Pachycephalosaurus -- a large dome-headed dinosaur. And in 1998, he helped excavate and prepare two giant North American Oviraptors, birdlike omnivorous dinosaurs that previously were thought to be 3 feet tall. These were 8 feet tall and never before found in North America.

Triebold timed his job switch perfectly, getting into the fossil business just as a dinosaur craze began -- spurred by the "Jurassic Park" films of the 1990s.

Museums, seeking to draw more people, were offering top dollars for dinosaur fossils.

Full dinosaur skeletons still sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The most anyone has paid is $8.6 million for the largest and most complete T. rex.

Triebold wouldn't say how much he makes selling his skeletons. His work, however, can be found in about 75 museums around the world, as well as in amusement parks and universities.

He also sells to private collectors and has traveling collections.

Major museums and universities collaborate with him to make molds of their inventories.

In exchange, Triebold retains the rights to sell the casts, which range in price from $495 for the skull cast of a Platecarpus planifrons -- a 14-foot-long marine reptile that lived in the seas during the late Cretaceous period -- to $67,500 for a full Tylosaurus skeleton -- a large, carnivorous marine lizard.

Triebold moved his business to Woodland Park in 1996, because he and his wife liked the area.

Triebold Paleontology Inc. has 18 employees, a production shop in North Dakota and the main lab is in Woodland Park.

"One of the reasons for our success is I'm a paleontologist with a business background," Triebold said.

The combination of business with science is at the center of a controversy in the paleontology world, pitting academics and their studies against people making money from the fossil trade.

Academics say the booming trade is placing prime specimens in the marketplace and out of reach of researchers.

Commercial fossil hunters say it's the American way -- capitalism in its purest form. They lease private land, give landowners a share in the profits and keep making discoveries.

Sometimes they sell to museums, sometimes to private collectors -- whoever has the most money.

"What Mike is doing is legal, but it probably isn't the best for science," said Kirk Johnson, head of the Earth Science Department of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Generally, researchers won't study a specimen unless it's assured it will remain in the public trust for perpetuity, which means it stays in a museum or university, Johnson said.

"Mike has been involved in the discovery of two phenomenal skeletons -- two Oviraptors," he said. "But no one has (published) them."

Without published research about a dinosaur, the less fame the specimen receives and the less important its existence is to science, he said.

"The bottom line is no professional paleontologist will (study the specimen) because they will be adding value to it in the marketplace."

Triebold doesn't like to discuss the controversy. He said he keeps copious notes about his digs, allows scientists complete access to his findings and welcomes their analysis.

Robert Bakker, a Boulder dinosaur expert who was a consultant for the "Jurassic Park" films, called Triebold one of the world's top paleontologists.

"He's the kind of guy, if he wanted to, could be teaching and be a professor. But he's having too much fun," Bakker said.

"Mike is a consummate professional about dinosaur bones. I've learned a lot talking with Mike. He's very generous with his scientific knowledge. If you give someone a Ph.D., sometimes they get the impression that they're better than you."

Triebold is one of the best at digging and presenting the skeletons, Bakker said.

"There are not a lot of people doing dinosaurs full time," he said. "Digging them up without breaking them is hard. Finding museum space to place them in while they get cleaned is difficult. The big bottleneck is space and intelligent people to dig, clean, house them and display them."

Triebold does it all, but it's not glamorous work.

It's painstaking and tedious labor done in hot and dry conditions in some of the world's most unforgiving places, such as the Badlands of the Dakotas or the scrublands of eastern Montana.

For the past year, Triebold and his crew have focused on the juvenile T. rex in the middle of Montana.

The remains are in a small gully that by the afternoon becomes an oven in 100-plus temperatures. The crew camps in cars or tents, working long hours chiseling hardened rock.

One recent week, Triebold joined Dave Ehlert, 35, and Walter Stein, 32, at the site. They'd been there for weeks, digging through the sandstone.

They had recovered about 35 percent of the skeleton, or 130 fossils, including important bones from the head, neck, legs and spine.

Triebold hopes they may get at least 50 percent of the dinosaur by the time they finish next year.

He estimates this juvenile T. rex was about 8 feet tall from the hips to the ground and weighed as much as 4,000 pounds -- a third of the size of its dad.

He said it was serendipitous to find the fossil, when he searched the 43,000-acre ranch at the owner's request a year ago.

Triebold and his team were looking for telltale signs of Hell Creek rock formations -- outcroppings of prehistoric muds and sands that typically contain dinosaur fossils. They found a patch and investigated. Within minutes, they had discovered their juvenile T. rex in the stone.

"Dinosaur fossils are not rare," said Stein, who'll be the center's curator. "Finding complete specimens are."

They traced the bone back into the rock to see if there was any more of it. Within a few weeks, they had found pieces of the skull, limbs, vertebrae and ribs.

Complete skeletons rarely are found. Usually the bones are scattered by scavengers, ruined by exposure or moved by the shifting of the earth. Typically, the farther the fossil is from the surface, the better its condition.

Sometimes the rock is softer or the fossil is in easier-to-reach positions. Other times it's hard rock and deep in the stone. In those cases, the fossil hunters chew away at the rock with large equipment, such as front-end loaders, to reach the deep strata where the fossils are found.

Tools get progressively smaller as they close in on the bones -- moving from jackhammers and air hammers to dental picks and brushes in the end.

Once they locate something they want to keep, the dinosaur hunters chip around the fossil, leaving it in a halo of stone and encased in plaster for transport to the laboratory.

Back at the shop, workers use dentist-like drills to expose the fossil, gluing fractured pieces and preserving it with sealant. Slowly, they begin removing the bones from the rocks, restoring the rock and finally mounting the skeleton. The best finds get molded and casts to make copies.

"Movies make it look like clean and tidy work, and that couldn't be further from the truth," Triebold said. "Projects measure in years from start to finish. The average elephant-sized dinosaur from beginning of collection to the mounting can take up to 15,000 hours."

It's worth it, he said.

"We're actually creating a legacy -- a contribution to science," he said. "It's a form of time travel. While you're collecting the skeleton, you're discovering how it died, the injuries it had, the diseases. There are so many questions unanswered that we're helping to answer."

The Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center is part of a plan to revitalize downtown Woodland Park, changing the city west of Colorado Springs into a tourist destination.

Work is under way on the $3.5 million, 18,000-square-foot center near the town's core.

The building will be at the corner of South Fairview Avenue and U.S. Highway 24 on the land where the Woodland Park Baptist Church recently was located.

The church is being moved.

Voters in November will be asked to approve a $30 million bond to help pay for other attractions, including a 2,000-seat events center and a recreation complex.

The Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center is the key to the city's future, City Manager Mark Fitzgerald said.

"It's the cornerstone of the redevelopment," Fitzgerald said. "We see it as a catalyst and a very important catalyst. Besides the fact that it will serve as a destination in and of itself, it will allow other people to seize the market and it will open up additional markets for restaurants and overnight lodging."

The city plans to contribute about $250,000 to the dinosaur center, according to owner Michael Triebold.

The center will open in the spring and feature dozens of Triebold's dinosaur fossils, including meat-eaters, plant-eaters, omnivores, ancient lizards, sea creatures and a Tyrannosaurus rex. It will have research facilities for academics to study the bones and windows for the public to watch Triebold and his staff prepare skeletons.

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(c) 2003, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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