Diggers

Sweat on learned brows . . . the pick-and-shovel corps of Science toiling far afield... unearthing the bones of vanished animals, the relics of dead civilizations...bringing their treasures to bustling cities for common men to see in museums. Doings of diggers lately:

Wyoming was warm, wet and flat 125,000,000 years ago. It was a tropical land dotted by lakes and marshes, webbed by languid rivers. The water was alive with huge reptiles, sleeping, floating, wading, swimming, browsing lazily on the lush water plants and swamp grasses. They were sauropods-- long-necked, long-tailed, bullet-headed dinosaurs, weighing 15 or 20 tons.

The climate changed. Rivers shrank to rills, lakes to ponds, ponds to puddles. Too cumbersome to migrate, herds of sauropods huddled in the dwindling water, died like flies. A dozen or more last survivors perished in one small pool. Clay and sandstone covered the bones. In the course of ages the pool bottom became a hilltop in Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains. A rancher stumbled on the spot, saw some outcroppings, informed Dr. Barnum Brown, curator of fossil reptiles at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History.

Two years ago Dr. Brown partly exposed the remains of two sauropods, was halted by lack of funds. This year Oilman Harry Ford Sinclair, who uses a dinosaur trademark to dramatize the age of his petroleum beds, offered to finance another expedition. Last month Dr. Brown bared no less than eight skeletons of the ancient monsters. Last fortnight he uncovered four more. The twelve skeletons are apparently of a hitherto unknown species. In an exultant but anxious message to the Museum last week Dr. Brown reported the welter of bones so tangled that none could be moved until charts and photographs have been made and the entire 25 x 60 ft. site excavated.

Dr. Brown was afraid of rain, which is likely to turn exposed fossils into meaningless brown powder. In sizzling heat that reached a 140DEG peak, the diggers dug drainage ditches, got tarpaulins and blankets ready, rushed work on a seven-mile road to the main highway.

Bald Barnum Brown was born in Carbondale, Kans. 61 years ago. He has hunted bones off & on for 30 years, gave up a lucrative job as an oil geologist to devote all his time to paleontology. He has dug up hundreds of fossils on five continents, including the best extant specimens of a nodosaur (or epinodosaur), and a hoplitosaur, two rare species of armored, thick-set dinosaurs. He considers his enthusiasm "a form of dementia."

Manitoba. First discovery of a mosasaur skull was made in 1780 by quarrymen near Maestrict, Holland. The fossil started a lawsuit, attained such fame that a French general attacking Maestrict ordered his gunners not to molest the house containing it. Cruising the shallow seas of the Chalk Age (60-100 million years ago), the mosasaurs, though true reptiles, were completely aquatic. Their legs had become flippers. They had formidably toothed mouths which a specially jointed lower jaw enabled them to open very wide. The smallest species was eight feet long, the largest more than 40. The big ones could swallow 100-lb. fish whole.

This summer an employe of a U.S. cosmetics company, digging for betonite near Morden, Man., struck fossils. Paleontologist C.M. Sternberg of Ottawa's National Museum rushed thither, exhumed two 35-ft. mosasaur skeletons, declared them the best of the genus ever found in Canada.

Idaho. Near the confluence of the tiny Salmon Falls River and the Snake River, 10 to 15 million years ago, was a watering place where went teeming herds of Plesippus, an equine creature far up the scale from the little "Dawn horse". Last week the Smithsonian announced that 25 skulls of Plesippus stallions, mares, colts and fillies had lately been turned up there.

Iraq. The great palace at Khorasbad of Sargon II, ruler of Assyria 2,600 years ago, has kept diggers of the University of Chicago last week by Leader Gordon Loud, was to excavate a 420 x 250 ft. temple, connected to the palace by a graceful stone viaduct and dedicated to Nabu, god of scribes and historians. Nabu's staue was gone from the central shrine where once it stood. But on the stonework bordering the steps was a prayer addressed to Nabu by King Sargon. There were carvings in wood and ivory, some of Egyptian inspiration, others bearing Phonecian winged sphinxes, bronze hinges engraved with images of bulls, men, centaurs, mermaids; an ivory fragment depicting a woman staring out of a window.

At Tel Asmar, 50 mi. northeast of Bagdad, other Oriental Institute diggers turned up stone statues of the "Lord of Fertility" and the "Mother Goddess." Both had huge round eyes and grand-piano legs, were otherwise personable. The Lord of Fertility was about 30 in. tall, wore a knee-length fringed skirt, an elegantly curled beard. The Mother Goddess, somewhat shorter than her consort, wore a close-fitting garment like a slip, with an almost modern cape effect on one side. The statues were ascribed to the Sumerian culture of 3000 B.C.

Egypt. Excavating the buried city of Karanis, University of Michigan archeologists laid bare a squat building composed of four apartments or cells. Groping through the murky interior they came upon vast clay jars and moldering cloth bags containing some 26,000 bronze coins of local manufacture. The diggers surmised that this was the ancient bank whose existence they had suspected since finding elsewhere in the ruins a papyrus recording what seemed to be bank transactions. All the coins were dated prior to 296 A.D. In that year Roman Emperor Diocletian banned local coinage to introduce a standard monetary unit of his own. Thus, if the four-celled structure was not a bank, it was the hiding-place of some Third Century miser, whose hoard had been rendered worthless by the imperial edict.

British Honduras, About the time Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem, the Mayas were developing their civilization in Central America. In the early Christian era the Mayan culture attained the peak of its splendor. The priests invented a form of writing; the mathematicians and astronomers worked out a calendar; the architects built great cities and temples; the artisan modeled in stucco, wove textiles, carved and painted with rare skill.

Confronted by traces of a general exodus into Yucatan between 530 and 629 A.D., archeologists have long held that the Mayas, driven out by famine, pestilence, war, or decadence, left the Old Empire cities wholly deserted. Last spring J. Eric Thompson of Chicago's Field Museum made excavations in the Old Empire site around San Jose, reported evidence of continuous occupation down to the 15th Century, just before the Spanish invasions. He dug up copper vessels, a shred of cloth smaller than a dime, neither of which had been found in this region before ; an axe carved from a single block of obsidian; a mirror wrought from a circular piece of hematite; a beautiful jade head in the grave of a sacrificed child.

Palestine. In the city of Lachish, 35 mi. southwest of Jerusalem, King Rehoboam, son of Solomon, built a great wall. Beyond the wall some seasons ago a deep ditch was found. Clearing away the filling this year a British expedition led by J. L. Starkey uncovered, 60 ft. below the city level, a temple erected long before Rehoboam's wall. It was first built in the 15th Century B.C., when southern Palestine was under the political sway and religious influence of Egypt. Most valued find was a ewer inscribed with characters like magnifications of bizarre microbes. On examination this writing revealed affinities with Sinaitic scripts discovered near Mt. Sinai and with Phoenician scripts found in Syria. Orientalists were excited at this unexpected bridging of an ancient linguistic gap.

Algeria. A group of French diggers directed by the Rev. Father Lapeyre this summer probed the temple of Tanit, on the site of ancient Carthage. Virgin Queen of the moon and heavens. Tanit was the goddess who was elsewhere known as Artemis, Astarte, Ashtoreth, Demeter, Diana. The Carthaginian Tanit was, according to Father Lapeyre's report last week, a lover of child sacrifice. Urns were unearthed containing the charred bones of children as old as 12, as young as a few months. Animal bones found in other receptacles led expedition members to guess that lambs, pigs, kids had been offered as ransom for intended child victims.

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