November 13–20, 1997

cover story

sidebar: Dino, Pa

In 1858, the Academy of Natural Sciences displayed the first nearly intact dinosaur skeleton found on this continent.

Dinofest's anticipated audience of 500,000 people in one month, if realized, would set an attendance record for traveling exhibits of dinosaur fossils.

"The popularization and commercialization of dinosaurs, far from being something to be frowned on, is the only thing that's going to bring money in," says Tess Kissinger.

Dino Attack!

The largest dinosaur show ever opens in Philadelphia next spring. The national Dinosaur Society moved here last month. And America's leading dinosaur artists live in Fairmount.

So how'd Philly get to be prehistory city?

by Jennifer Rauch

Tucked away behind the grape arbor and peach tree of a private garden in Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood hides a treasure trove: a two-story barn that once upon a time housed horses and hay.

Nowadays, it's where Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger keep their dinosaurs.

There's no full-scale Tyrannosaurus rex or Apatosaurus, to be sure. But the barn-cum-studio is brimming with bona fide bones that were buried more than 65 million years ago.

And trilobite fossils they dug up just north of here.

Plus plaster casts of claws, dagger-like serrated teeth, and footprints big as hubcaps.

And all kinds of other dinosaur crap, including actual defecation that's certainly prettier petrified than it was before.

Sounds like Jurassic paradise to the millions with prehistoric hysteria, but these are just tools of the trade for the Walters & Kissinger team, who are living a dinomaniac's dream as paleontological reconstructors.

In other words, dinosaur artists.

"Every time fossil hunters dig a hole into this planet, something new crawls out of it," says Kissinger, a Bucks County native who was first to draw the skull of Giganotosaurus, the newfound 40-foot-long dinosaur that went on display at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences this year.

"Seven or eight new kinds of dinosaurs are discovered every year. It's pretty amazing stuff, because we're doing the very first life restorations of these animals that no one has ever seen. It's almost like being a forensic anthropologist."

Walters, her partner of 17 years in life and art, points out some samples of their work: technical renderings of dinosaur skulls (her specialty), vivid illustrations of dinosaurs cavorting in their natural habitats (his), and studies of anatomical detail and movement.

Leaning forward, Walters affectionately traces the outline of dienonychus, a.k.a. velociraptor, which hangs on the wall. As he does so, his knees collide with a rectangular box, knocking over the tiny paper people within.

"That represents a happy museum-going family," he says as he rights the model of the new, interactive Dinosaur Hall that he's designing for the Academy. It's a massive project: a $4.2 million renovation that must be completed before half a million visitors arrive in March for Dinofest, the largest-ever gathering of dinosaur fossils, experts and fans, to be held partly at the Academy and at one or two other venues to be announced Nov. 18. Crowds are expected to equal the numbers that flocked to Philly to see the Cézanne exhibit, in half the time.

As Kissinger dashes through the garden en route to a logo-design meeting at the Academy, Walters points out a sign on the studio wall: "Warning: dates on this calendar are closer than they appear." The countdown to Dinofest has begun.

The demand for things prehistoric has peaked in recent years, and museums are eager to satisfy the insatiable demand for dinosaur-related exhibits, artwork, books, movies, toys, anything.

So are the commercial media, with the pseudo-saurus Barney singing songs of love to 5 million rapt pre-schoolers every day in the United States, and the prehistoric predators of Jurassic Park and The Lost World luring more than 100 million viewers to theaters throughout the world.

And then there's all the stuff. The purple one's image graces everything from stuffed animals to bibs and blankies; Spielberg has single-handedly spawned an estimated billion-dollar merchandising industry; and at the Academy of Natural Sciences, schoolchildren beg their chaperones to let them visit the gift shop, where dinosaurs outnumber all other creatures.

Penn prof Peter Dodson, who wrote many of the primary texts for dinosaur studies, may be the only guy in town to have named a dinosaur after his wife.

 

While many curse commerce for appropriating their beloved beasts, many of today's paleontology workers were drawn into the field—and into Philadelphia's dinosaur community—by popular culture.

For Bob Walters, a life-changing revelation came wrapped in the pages of Life magazine.

"I knew I wanted to be a dinosaur artist when I was 4 years old," Walters says, picking up the copy of Life that sealed his fate. "I saw this gatefold illustration by Rudolf Vallinger and thought, 'Hey, I could do that.'" The young Bobby W. was soon drawing faithful imitations, in red and blue crayon, of Vallinger's creatures.

In the late 1970s, when Walters began his career, a renaissance in dinosaur art and science was beginning to coalesce. The creatures—once considered slow, stupid, cold-blooded reptiles that lived in swamps—were being reconceived as active land-dwellers that could be both intelligent and endothermic.

Modern dinosaur drawings, to be scientifically accurate, have to be built from the bones up: first reconstructing the musculature and the flesh, then the movement and finally the creature's habitat.

As to what color an individual dinosaur was, Walters says it's mostly conjecture because skin samples are extremely rare.

"We tend to portray dinosaurs in dull colors, because many big mammals today aren't very colorful," says the Philadelphia native, who has illustrated two dozen books on the subject.

"But that may be because mammals don't see color very well. Birds see it much better. We really don't know how brightly colored the dinosaurs might have been."

When Walters helped animate dinosaur movement for PBS, he constructed a walk cycle by studying film footage of ostriches and applying that movement to the leg bones of a dinosaur.

With our knowledge of dinosaurs constantly evolving, Walters and Kissinger have to keep pace with a plethora of new theories and discoveries. Part of that professional development was taking a course devoted to skulls last year with University of Pennsylvania professor Pete Dodson, one of the world's leading dinosaur paleontologists and an expert anatomist.

Josh Smith, a Ph.D. student at Penn, took a different path into dinosauria, via geology.

As a fifth grader enamored with dinosaurs, Smith decided he wanted to be a paleontologist when he grew up.

"I come from an area of Connecticut where dinosaur footprints are common as teeth," says Smith. "I spent my childhood sliding down red rocks, looking at the tracks and thinking, 'Those are pretty cool.'

"Nova was forced viewing in my household," says Smith. "Around 1980 I distinctly remember sitting spellbound watching a program on asteroids and the dinosaurs. Afterwards I ran through the house shouting, 'An asteroid killed the dinosaurs!' From then on, I was a dinogeek."

While others were lured into more secure careers, Smith stuck with his interest.

"I walked into college saying I wanted to be a paleontologist, and everyone said I'd never get a job. They steered me towards geology as an undergrad, and for a while I was clouded by a veil of 'hydrogeology practicality,' I like to call it."

After scoring some rare opportunities to work with the U.S. Geological Survey on a dinosaur dig and to do dinosaur bone preparation at the Smithsonian Institute, Smith realized a career in paleontology might not be as implausible as it seemed.

He's now working with Professor Dodson.

"I started looking into graduate programs, and was told there were only four schools where you could study dinosaur paleontology and expect to get a job. Penn was one of them."

That school's tradition in dinosaur paleontology is one of the reasons budding dinosaur paleontologists like Josh Smith and Bob Walters are drawn to Philadelphia. Another is the Academy of Natural Sciences, the nation's oldest science institution.

Joseph Leidy was associated with both.

Widely regarded as the father of U.S. paleontology, Leidy, a Penn instructor, mounted and displayed the first nearly intact dinosaur skeleton found on this continent in 1858.

Thom Homes, the Cherry Hill author of The Fossil Feud: The Rivalry of the First American Dinosaur Hunters, says that Leidy didn't find the bones, because, at that time, paleontologists didn't actively dig for fossils. However, when some farmers showed the hadrosaurus bones to Leidy, he was content to pluck them from the ground and reassemble the skeleton for the Academy's first dinosaur exhibition.

Researchers believe that the duck-billed hadrosaurus—whose name is Latin for "bulky lizard," and not a tribute to its final resting place, Haddonfield—died in New Jersey 75 million years ago but probably hung out in Pennsylvania, too.

"Back then, it was a shallow intercoastal marshy area where dinosaurs would roam and die," says Holmes. "A lot of bones accumulated there, and for a while New Jersey was the fossil capital of North America."

In the 1870s, a Leidy student named Edwin Drinker Cope reinforced the reputations of Philadelphia and the Academy as the birthplace of dinosaur studies when he entered into a bitter rivalry known as "the great bone rush" with Yale University fossil hunter Othneil Marsh.

What had begun as friendship ended in feud when Marsh started secretly buying bones from Cope's suppliers, and escalated when Marsh corrected Cope for putting the head at the wrong end of a skeleton.

Marsh was out to fill Yale's Peabody Museum with fossils and Cope was on staff at the Academy, according to Holmes.

"They created a dinosaur craze in the media that lasted through the turn of the century, going at each other tooth and nail in the press, hunting the same turf, and disputing each others findings," he says.

Holmes says that the rivals made a lasting contribution to dinosaur science nonetheless, establishing many of the field practices still in use today and discovering a total of 37 species in a span of 25 years.

After that, the field of dinosaur studies experienced a prolonged lull.

Until now.

The Philadelphia dinosaur community is both flourishing in and fostering the modern dinosaur renaissance, thanks in large part to the efforts of Peter Dodson and Don Wolberg.

Professor Dodson wrote many of the primary texts for dinosaur studies, including the recent The Horned Dinosaurs, illustrated by Bob Walters. And he may be the only guy in town to have named a dinosaur after his wife (Ava, hence, the Avaceratops).

"Things were pretty sluggish, but the pace has been increasing since around 1975," he says. "In the last two decades alone, we've discovered half of all the known kinds of dinosaurs, at the rate of a new kind every seven weeks or so. And we've barely scratched the surface."

Dodson is also vice president of the Dinosaur Society, which moved its headquarters to Philadelphia last month to join new president Wolberg, executive director of special projects at the Academy and founder of Dinofest.

Wolberg, who this week begins hosting a new live TV show for the Philadelphia public school system to encourage kids to dig into science, says Dinofest is more comprehensive than competing roadshows (which include Robots of Dinomation and Dinosaurs of The Lost World and Jurassic Park, not to mention next spring's Jurassicon convention in Atlanta.)

"Dinofest will bring together scholars, fossils, kids, adults and teachers to interact with the exhibit. We're having a Dinofeast banquet featuring only food that was available during the age of the dinosaurs: things like ferns, alligator, shark, twigs and nuts. There will be also be a dinosaur art show, and a three-day symposium with 500 dinosaur scientists."

The Academy of Natural Sciences has been preparing for Dinofest for more than a year, hiring marketing and advertising specialists, bringing in interns from out of state, launching a Dinofest Web site, and planning a multi-million-dollar renovation of Dinosaur Hall.

Not to mention finding a venue or venues in addition to the Academy that are big enough to hold the event.

In the middle of Dinosaur Hall, the king of the lizards stands caged. Within a frame of aluminum studs and protective sheets, the museum's prized Tyrannosaurus Rex is an island in a sea of construction. The work is coming along nicely, but it's far from complete.

Or paid for. The Academy is still looking for grants to pay for the project.

"We're proceeding anyway, because otherwise we won't get the money," says Bob Walters. "People prefer to give you funding when they see you doing something, not twiddling your thumbs talking about what you might do."

The pay-as-you-go plan worked like a charm the last time he helped the Academy renovate Dinosaur Hall 12 years ago for $2.5 million, Walters says, and this year's changes are much more ambitious, including new graphic presentations, a 73-foot mural and interactive displays.

"That was a revolutionary exhibit in 1986, but there's enough new stuff now to justify redoing it," says Walters. "A lot of the dinosaur mounts are the same, but we've added more. We're also improving access to the mezzanine space, which hasn't been used as well as it could have been."

Space is indeed at a premium at the Academy, which is why the first two Dinofest events were held in Tempe, AZ, and Bloomington, IN, says Wolberg.

"You need a total of at least 100,000 square feet and the Academy only has a couple of halls with less than 5,000 apiece," says the Dinofest founder. "Even when the Dinosaur Hall is completed, we'll still have to hold off-site events linked with a shuttle. But we've had great cooperation with the other Parkway entities, the transit people and the mayor's office."

There are few single facilities in Philadelphia with sufficient square footage to vie for Dinofest: the Civic Center, perhaps, or Girard College, or the Franklin Institute, which in January 1996 hosted the Dinosaur Society's Jurassic Park tour in its 15,000-foot traveling exhibit space.

Even as mammoth shipments of dinosaur fossils arrive—prompting warehouse workers to lament that the inventory has no bar-codes—the Academy won't divulge where Dinofest will be held.

"We're planning to make the announcement on the 18th," says Academy spokesperson Liz Carey. "It's a huge secret."

Huge indeed.

Part of what makes dinosaurs so consuming, of both floor space and our imaginations, is their gargantuan scale.

Paradoxically, people in the field accomplish their work with a microscopic budget, says Don Wolberg. He estimates the total amount of money spent on dinosaur science to be around $1 million annually, with about 100 working dinosaur paleontologists, less than 30 of them digging, and only two on staff at U.S. museums.

While scant government and private funding for "soft" sciences is available to museums and universities, some commercial enterprises are reaping enormous profit from marketing dinosaurs.

Forbes magazine, noting that most studios are close-mouthed about their merchandising income, guesses that merchandising and licensing add at least $5 billion to film revenues, and that Disney's merchandising business was 50 percent more profitable than its movie business; according to Peter Dodson, the movie Jurassic Park alone allegedly generated $1 billion in total revenues for Universal.

Last month, the McDonald's and Disney corporations upped the ante, putting an even heftier price tag on that old dinosaur magic. In the name of the Chicago Field Museum, the two megaliths bought a T. rex fossil named "Sue" for the whopping sum of $8.2 million, outbidding all the paleontologists at the auction. (The real bones will go on display at the museum, while Ronald and Walt will make life-size casts.)

The dinosaur community is still suffering from sticker shock.

Peter Dodson says dinosaur workers don't cherish the notion of fixing a value on fossils. "We're babes in the woods. We just want to find them and study them."

Wolberg is saddened that little or none of that money will benefit science or education. "Eight million dollars could have endowed 10 university chairs and supported 200 graduate students."

What's more, he adds, "The marketing people at these corporations never even talk to paleontologists. T. rexeses aren't even uncommon. For $8 million, we could have gone in the field and found 20 more T. rexeses. I'd be surprised if anyone even made any money off of that thing. It's completely out of the realm of reality and into the realm of hype."

However crass the market may appear, it does offer dinosaur researchers, educators and artists unprecedented opportunities.

"The popularization and commercialization of dinosaurs, far from being something to be frowned on, is the only thing that's going to bring money in," says Tess Kissinger. "If people aren't excited about something, it won't get funded."

Kissinger says that she and Walters derive only a small portion of their income from working with museums and academia, which commands the most time. The real money comes from commercial artwork and consulting on dinosaur promotions, from Casio watches to McDonald's cups.

Holding up a book he illustrated for one university, Walters adds, "I spent four years on this. But McDonald's, that was a nice piece of change for virtually no work."

"Drawing dinosaurs for museums is very different from doing them for cereal boxes," says Kissinger.

Funneling public and corporate support into research and educational projects is also the thrust of the Dinosaur Society, and Jurassic Park was its cash cow.

The society's traveling exhibit, Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park , was Philadelphia's last big dinoevent; housed at the Franklin Institute between October 1995 and January 1996, the show attracted 217,000 visitors.

"It was the most popular touring exhibit in natural history museums in a decade, and all the profit went to dinosaur research," says the Society's Don Wolberg.

"We raised money as never before for this impoverished science, $1 million during the last three years, more than ever before from a private source."

Then The Lost World came along and screwed things up.

Universal Studios had given the Jurassic Park rights to the Society for three years. When the sequel was released, Universal decided to give the rights to both movies to the Society's founder and former president, Don Lessem, who is also a popular author of more than 20 children's books, including the Walters-illustrated Bigger than T. Rex.

As a result of the shifted alliance, all of the Dinosaur Society's grant programs are on hold.

Wolberg says that federal funding doesn't offer a viable alternative to corporate sponsorship and private endowment.

"Government grants demand a lot of time and energy, just to meet their reporting requirements. The institutions don't have enough control, and the name of the game in science is freedom of thought. Einstein wouldn't have gotten a grant."

Ted Daeschler, manager of the Academy's vertebrate biology collections, reluctantly agrees.

"Personally, I don't want to be part of somebody's marketing budget. But the major application of dinosaurs really is popularization.

"To some extent, dinosaur work is knowledge for knowledge's sake. It teaches us about ancient climates, evolution, and stuff like that, but it doesn't necessarily have an applied use, like a cure for cancer."

Wolberg says that dinosaurs' greatest service to society is as an educational tool.

"They get kids interested in literacy, the scientific method, and the world around them. Everything from A to Z, I like to say, from astronomy to zoology. And it gets kids, and adults, into institutions like the Academy where they can explore the world in a user-friendly way."

Daeschler elaborates. "Dinofest is a hook. One of the underlying messages, which is overtly expressed, is, 'Hey, you can learn about dinosaurs by learning about yourself. Like the mechanics of arms and levers. You can figure out how fast a dinosaur runs from looking at its footprints and a little geometry.'"

The Academy, which averages about 200,000 visitors each year, may set an attendance record for traveling exhibits of dinosaur fossils if Dinofest's anticipated audience of 500,000 people in one month is realized. (Other such exhibits have pulled in a maximum of 53,000 visitors per week.)

It would also prove an even bigger draw than the 1996 Cézanne exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which pulled in that many visitors in two months.

Tony Sorrentino of the Franklin Institute says the Parkway museums don't consider themselves competitors.

"We're all neighbors, and like to think that all boats rise with the tide. When one succeeds, so do the rest," he says.

Josh Smith, who says he used to think of Philadelphia as a rundown national park, says, "I'm glad to see things being focused here again. Dinofest will be a hoot, and will bring a lot of attention back to our dinosaur community again."

Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger are immersed in the life and lore of long-ago eras—in more ways than washing up with dinosaur-shaped soap and drying their hands on dinosaur-embossed towels.

Go ahead. Ask them any question about prehistory.

Did birds really evolve from dinosaurs?

The jury's still out on that one, says Walters, but it looks more likely that birds and dinosaurs evolved together from a common ancestor.

What did the earth look like during the Mesozoic Age?

There are a lot of environments and plants around today that are thought to resemble those that existed when "terrible lizards" roamed the earth, Kissinger says. For example, the Pine Barrens, the Pacific Northwest and the Everglades.

Were real velociraptors as clever as the ones in Jurassic Park?

"The movie said that they're as fast as a cheetah, as smart as a chimpanzee," says Walters. "In reality, researchers think they were as fast as an ostrich, as smart as a poodle. And they weren't human-size, like in the movie, but more like hip-height. And their real name is dienonychus."

Uh, how do you spell that?

"D-I-E-N-O-N-Y-C-H-U-S. There's a 5-year-old out there who could spell it faster than me, I assure you, and argue with me about its pronunciation. 'No, it's dieno-NY-chus.' Well, I say 'Die-NO-nychus, kid.'"

This dinosaur duo loves their job.

"There are very few job opportunities where discovery is the name of the game," Kissinger says. "Working with dinosaurs, you're adding to the knowledge of mankind and doing work of historical significance. It's not surprising that even though there's practically no money in it, people aren't dissuaded from doing it."

She adds, "By putting out our illustrations, and doing stuff like Dinofest, we can have a profound impact on the possible new scientists of the next generation. That's why I think this renaissance is going to continue to feed."