Our movie opens with a telephone ringing in the cramped office of an associate professor in a small Midwestern college on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.
A muscular arm reaches toward the telephone, crossing a desk littered with color slides, photographs and sketches. The camera pans the articles on the desk, landing first on a photograph of a bearded man in winter survival gear standing on an ice mountain. He is brandishing a gasoline-powered rock saw.
With the soundtrack music rising dramatically, the camera fixes on a drawing beside the photograph. It depicts a monster, 30 feet long and walking erect. On its large head are devilish horns, and between its sinister eyes is a malevolent, bony crest.
The music rises louder still as the hand picks up the telephone receiver. A strong male voice growls, “Hammer, Geology.”
Roll the opening credits. Pass the popcorn to Spielberg and Crichton.
You’ve seen their computer-assisted movie fantasy, now sit back and enjoy a real-life story of dino-discovery set here in the heartland and starring an intrepid adventurer whose name is too good to be true.
But it is, said William R. Hammer. “I tell my students that the middle `r’ stands for `Rock.’ “
Hammer, an assistant professor and chairman of the geology department at little Augustana College in Rock Island, has just become a major star in the paleontological universe because of his discovery of a particularly unusual species of carnivorous dinosaur.
Even more box-office boffo is that the 43-year-old scientist made his discovery in a place where many had believed no dinosaurs ever existed: on a mountainside about 400 miles from the South Pole in Antarctica.
Said John Bolt, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago: “This is a very exciting discovery because he has found a significant amount of material from several species of dinosaur in Antarctica, and the best material is from a carnivorous dinosaur with some sort of skull ornamentation-a crested theropod,” a flesh-eating dinosaur that walked mainly on its hind legs.
Talk about your blockbuster concepts. Call this movie “Jurassic Park on Ice.” But what will Hammer call his devilish dinosaur?
“I have an idea, but I’m not going to say. We’ll suggest a name when we publish in some scholarly journal later this summer,” Hammer said.
“You hear about some guys calling their dinosaurs `Sue,’ but that’s not how academics work,” he added. “While we’re studying it we just call it the `Antarctic theropod,’ or whatever.”
Even without a name, Hammer’s find is already a hit at the Field Museum, where portions of its skull bones are being prepared for a special display to be unveiled soon.
“This is really neat stuff,” enthused Bolt, who has known Hammer for decades and has followed his work since the Ph.D. paleontologist was a graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit. It was there that Hammer’s interest in biology and geology came together when an adviser steered him into the field of paleontology.
Hammer returned from his fourth trip to Antarctica two years ago and only now is beginning to chip away at 5,000 pounds of mountain rock to find out what exactly he brought home.
So far, the most material he and his assistants have found is from the new dinosaur, but they have also chipped out fossilized fragments of several other species, including a wing bone from a flying reptile, or Pterosaur; the foot bone of a huge Prosauropod dinosaur; and the tooth of an early mammal known as a Tritylodont.
An unlikely locale
Hammer’s find has made him a hot paleo-property, as evidenced by the incessant ringing of his office telephone at Augustana, a private school of about 2,100 students. The calls are professional congratulations, job offers, speaking requests and not a few mothers wondering if he would talk prehistory to their dinosaur-infatuated children. One recent request came from an amateur fossil-hunter hot to know which local quarry has the ripest rock.
Hammer wouldn’t be nailed down. “I know the best one, but the owner would kill me if I told,” he said. “They’ll have to find it for themselves.”
He knows what that’s like. Hammer has pretty much been on his own in searching for dinosaurs in Antarctica. “Some people think I’m nuts for going there when I could be working on a sunny mountainside in Colorado,” he said.
Even his celebrated discovery is unlikely to inspire a bone rush to a land where the summer sun never goes down and the temperature never goes up.
“It is not the sort of environment to which anyone can inject themselves,” Bolt said. “It is bloody hard, and not too many are eager to go there. It is actually dangerous.”
For many years, scientists theorized that there were no dinosaur bones to be found in Antarctica because dinosaurs were believed to have been cold-blooded and thus not able to survive its frigid climate.
But as the theory of continental drift became more widely accepted in the scientific community, the belief grew that more than 200 million years ago, Antarctica was part of a larger, warmer southern continent named Gondwanaland.
It is now commonly believed that Antarctica, as well as Africa, South America, Australia and India, are pieces of Gondwanaland. This theory holds that before the chunk that became Antarctica broke off and drifted into the frigid zones, it had a warm, pacific climate perfect for dinosaur life.
Years of preparation
Hammer, the son of a Detroit physician, first trekked to Antarctica in 1978 in search of prehistoric reptiles-not dinosaurs-as a graduate student accompanying his mentor, the late John Cosgriff of Wayne State University, who was among the first scientists to search for fossils on that remote continent.
Since that first trip, Hammer has returned three times, usually for two or three months at a time during the summer “when sometimes it gets above zero,” he said.
Scientific studies in Antarctica are extremely difficult undertakings, requiring years of planning, he said. Transportation, research and living costs often run into the millions of dollars for each trip. Funding is obtained from the federal government’s National Science Foundation, and transportation is coordinated through the Navy.
Before arriving in Antarctica, Hammer and his crew must undergo several weeks of survival training and equipment preparation on a military base on an island off the coast of New Zealand.
Antarctic accommodations are not provided by Holiday Inn. “We live in tents, camping down on the ice where it is warmer, generally 10 above or so,” Hammer said. “We are brought in on military planes fitted with skis for landing on the ice, and we have to be taken to the digging sites by helicopter.”
His research is personally difficult as well, because he has little contact with his wife, Karla, and son, Bradley, 9. There are no telephones, and mail comes only “once in a while,” Hammer said.
On his most recent Antarctic trip, Hammer was again searching for early reptile and amphibian fossils, which are his specialty, when he received a radio call from another group of scientists studying climate and weather conditions in the Antarctic.
A geologist from Ohio State University had been looking at ancient lava flows at an elevation of about 12,500 feet in the Transantarctic Mountains when his group discovered chunks of loose sediment with fossilized bones in them.
Staying the summer
“They called me on the radio and said these looked like pretty big bones,” he recalled. “They asked me to fly over to their camp about 40 miles away. He didn’t act that excited until I saw it and told him I thought we definitely had some big animal there.
“And then, when we actually got to the site where the sediment had come from, we could see a femur bone about 3 feet long sticking out of the rock.”
The sight of that big bone was enough to convince Hammer to pack up and move to the mountain for the rest of that summer.
“Two days later, we were back there,” he said. “I knew it was a dinosaur early on, but it wasn’t until we got back here and put the skull together that we knew what we had.”
Using power hammers and chisels, the scientists removed the 5,000 pounds of mountain rock, which then had to be airlifted out by helicopter, packed up and sent by cargo ship to the U.S. It was not light academic duty.
“The weather is always a concern. Flying around and landing in precarious places causes problems too,” he said. “We had a very tough place to land to pick up this dinosaur stuff.”
The tough place was a small landing platform built on the side of a cliff. “We had one slab of fossil rock that we had to load on a sling so that the helicopter could get it out. The pilot asked me how much it weighed and I had no idea, so I guessed about 400 pounds. It turned out to weigh 700 pounds,” the scientist said.
Because the slab weighed so much, the helicopter didn’t have enough power for a regular takeoff, so its pilots, two New Zealanders, made an odd request of Hammer and his team.
“He asked us to push the helicopter off the edge of the cliff,” Hammer said. “That way, he could drop off and build up airspeed. It was kind of fun. Afterward the pilot said he wasn’t worried because he could have hit a release button and dropped the slab and crushed it at the bottom of the mountain.”
The crowning glory
Upon returning to the Augustana campus, Hammer had to wait three months before the shipment of Antarctic fossil rock arrived. “It had been so long, we had actually forgotten what we had,” he said.
But then one day late last year, Hammer was summoned from his office to the laboratory by Bill Hickerson, a graduate assistant who had been chipping away at the rock.
“The initial dramatic moment came for Bill, who called me, and said he had found a piece that fit onto the dinosaur skull and that I was not going to believe it,” Hammer said. “It was the distinctive crest. Once we saw that, we knew we really had something.”
Hammer theorizes that the head crest of this meat-eating dinosaur was used to intimidate foes or to attract mates, “like a peacock’s feathers.”
Bolt said the crest on Hammer’s dinosaur appears to be a sheet of bone that would not be effective in actual combat, “but it could have been used to threaten other males: `My crest is bigger than yours, so get lost, buddy.’ “
The unique crest might also have made Hammer’s dinosaur the Luke Perry of the Jurassic period. “For a lady theropod, it might have looked charming beyond words,” Bolt said.
In fact, had this horned and crested carnivore been uncovered sooner, it might have gotten an agent and landed a leading role in a certain all-the-rage movie, though its discoverer probably wouldn’t have noticed.
” `Jurassic Park’? I haven’t seen it,” Hammer said. “I’m waiting for the lines to go down.”
