Clips

Name: Bob Harmon
Hometown: Bozeman, Montana
Vocation: Chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and crew chief
Known For: Finding the first dinosaur bones with soft tissue

Bob Harmon is not an excitable man. His face isn’t animated as he points out the sauropod leg he is building out of fossils and plaster for a Museum of the Rockies exhibit that will open this summer. He doesn’t jump up and down describing the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil he found in the Montana badlands, which — when sawed open and put under a microscope — revealed the first soft tissue found in dinosaur bones.

But the slight grin on his weathered face and the way his brown eyes laugh as he shares his stories make it clear that wandering around in the hot sun looking for dinosaurs electrifies this 50-something Montana native. As he puts it: “Prospecting and finding bone is a kick for me.”

Harmon is the right-hand man of Jack Horner, who is perhaps the world’s most famous paleontologist, the man who discovered that dinosaurs care for their young and also served as technical advisor to the Jurassic Park movies. Harmon is the chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and crew chief for a three-to-four-month field season each summer. Harmon is also something of an anomaly: Though his colleagues mostly have master’s or doctoral degrees, he never graduated high school.

“In a way, I don’t have any right to be here,” he says. “I quit school at 16 and never went back; I’ve just bluffed my way through it.”

Harmon grew up fishing and hunting around Cut Bank, Mont. As a kid on family outings, he collected fossilized snails. Then one day, 26 years ago, he stubbed his toe on a dinosaur bone. He didn’t know it was a dinosaur bone at the time, but the fossil intrigued him enough to prompt him to do a little research at the Cut Bank library. Unfortunately, he chuckles, “all they had were little kids’ dinosaur books.”

Not long after the failed library expedition, Harmon met the people who could satisfy his growing curiosity. One day, as he was out roaming the riverbank looking for fossils, Harmon spotted a paleontology field camp. Knowing the crew would be curious about someone wandering through their prospecting territory — and hoping they could identify the bones he had found — Harmon made sure to get noticed. “I kind of set myself up on a hill with my big Samoyed dog, and they came running,” he recalls.

This encounter led to dinner and Rainier beers with Jack Horner and his field crew. By the end of the evening, Harmon had been hired, giving up his career as an oil rig roughneck to become a professional bone collector.

Every summer, the hunt for fossils takes Harmon and his crew to some of the most inhospitable parts of Montana and Wyoming. With the sun blazing down, the crew spends all day prospecting for bones.

And sometimes the bones almost fall right out of the hillsides. Harmon was eating lunch one day in 2000, near the Fort Peck Reservoir in eastern Montana, when he turned around and noticed a T-Rex bone jutting out of the anticline above him. There was still soft tissue in the cracked femur of this 68 million-year-old dinosaur. It had been previously thought that organic material couldn’t exist in fossil material over 100,000 years old.

The dinosaur was named “B-Rex” for (Bob) Harmon, and today it sits in the museum upstairs from his lab. Harmon enjoys working in the lab, preparing fossils for researchers or museum exhibits. Still, it’s the fieldwork he loves. “It’s really something to see an animal come out of the earth,” he says, a grin spreading across his face. “You see a T-Rex skull come out of the ground, and it jacks you up.

“The prospect of discovery is the coolest thing. You never know what’s in the dirt until you start digging. Ninety percent of the time it’s nothing good; the good ones are so rare, but that’s what keeps it exciting.”

High Country News
April 30, 2007

Janelle Holden is in the business of changing minds — including her own. Holden, the coexistence director for the nonprofit Predator Conservation Alliance, grew up on a cattle ranch on the Great Plains, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front. When grizzly bears began moving into the area in the 1980s, her father was far from delighted.

Holden, the daughter of two Republican legislators, followed her parents’ political path. During college, she interned with Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, and later served as assistant communications director for Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, both Republicans and longtime opponents of predator recovery. After a year in Washington, D.C., Holden made her way back West, eventually moving to Colorado to work for two small-town newspapers.

Holden soon realized that the West was no longer the place she remembered or imagined. Oil and gas drilling and mining were changing the public lands, and while she still agreed with Republicans’ fiscal values, she began to question the party’s recent resistance to environmental laws and regulations.

In 2000, while she was working as the agriculture and public-lands reporter for the Cortez Journal and the Durango Herald, her political convictions received a serious jolt. Holden’s managing editor invited her to see then-presidential candidate Ralph Nader speak in Durango.

Holden found that several of Nader’s positions, such as legalizing the production of hemp for paper and clothing, made sense to her. "I’m a Republican, and I agree with this guy," she thought. "How can this be?" After the speech, she concluded, "I’m probably not in sync with Republicans on conservation anymore."

A few years later, Holden came upon an advertisement for a position with the nonprofit Predator Conservation Alliance in Montana. She thought it might be a way for her to work on the environmental issues she cared about. "I grew up on a ranch with grizzly bears," she thought. "Maybe they’ll hire me." She was right.

The alliance had noticed that, although conservationists were winning a lot of battles on behalf of predators in the courtroom, they weren’t gaining many new allies on the ground. The Range Riders Project, one of several that Holden manages, aims to do just that, working in partnership with the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group, an association of ranchers in southwest Montana.

The project has hired riders to patrol the sagebrush and stay near the livestock 24 hours a day, in hopes that the presence of humans and horses will deter wolves.

After only two field seasons, it’s too early to claim success, but no Madison Valley cows were killed by wolves this summer or the last. The project has been duplicated in the Boulder Valley south of Big Timber, Mont., with similarly encouraging results.

And Holden can take part of the credit for local ranchers’ enthusiasm. "She works for an environmental group with a big, scary name," says Todd Graham, ranch manager for the Sun Ranch in the Madison Valley, "but she plays her cards really well in front of a group of ranchers. Those are her ranch smarts coming into play."

High Country News
November 14, 2005

NAME
Cathy Whitlock

VOCATION
Montana State University paleoecologist

AGE
51

HOME BASE
Bozeman, Montana

NOTED FOR
Discerning ecosystem changes over the last 20,000 years

SHE SAYS
"It’s a great puzzle trying to figure out how an ecosystem works."

"For me, it’s about solving a big mystery," says Cathy Whitlock, describing her work as a paleoecologist at Montana State University. Whitlock studies the environments of the past, using pollen and charcoal remains from deeply buried lake sediments to understand how plant communities and climates have changed through time. Information about how ecosystems looked and operated thousands of years ago, she hopes, will also help society prepare for the future.

Whitlock has long been intrigued by the recent geological past. An avid hiker, she often uses her time on the trails to ask herself, "How did the ecosystem get to be like this? What explains the mosaic of trees?" She studied geology as an undergraduate at Colorado College and as a graduate student at the University of Washington, where she focused on "the younger side of geology" — the 20,000 years following the last ice age. After 14 years as a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon, Whitlock moved to Montana State University last July.

To understand the past, Whitlock and her graduate students wade into present-day wetlands, bogs and lakes, located throughout the coastal rainforest of Oregon, the Northern Rockies and the northern Great Plains.

They take samples at these longtime study sites by maneuvering a long sediment-coring "barrel," which looks like a metal pipe, into the muck and mud. Then, they muscle the barrel out of the sucking lake sediment, securing a sediment core just a meter long and 5 inches wide.

The cores are taken into the lab, sliced into sections about as thick as Oreo cookies, and examined under a high-resolution microscope. Each section represents approximately a decade of deposition, and contains a mixture of lake sediments, including charcoal and pollen from a variety of plant species. Whitlock’s practiced eye readily picks out pine pollen, which is shaped like miniature Mickey Mouse heads, and she can also distinguish the pollen of white pines from that of two- and three-needle pines.

By identifying pollen and dating charcoal deposits, Whitlock pieces together vegetation and fire patterns. For example, her research indicates an abrupt and widespread arrival of lodgepole pine in the Northern Rockies 11,000 years ago. "It suggests a rapid warming, and a shift towards more fires," she says. At the same time, Douglas-fir was appearing across the Pacific Northwest, spreading throughout the region in a matter of a few centuries. "When the climate warmed, it was suddenly everywhere," she says. "It is remarkable to think that our most common trees were once so sparse that we can’t locate their whereabouts during the glacial period."

High Country News
May 30, 2005

On a rainy spring day in western Oregon, five volunteers, clad in raingear and heavy work gloves, slowly work their way up the southeast flank of Mount Pisgah, a tract of private land looming above the Willamette River. Led by Kyra Kelly of the nonprofit Friends of Buford Park and Mount Pisgah, the volunteers cut back invasive species like six-foot-high Scotch broom and blackberry bush, revealing stunted, suffocated oaks they didn’t even know were there.

The group was started in 1989, when some local hikers and community leaders realized non-native plants and animals were overrunning the mountain’s native ecosystem.

"With invasive species, a small problem can become a big problem fast," says Jason Blazer, restoration coordinator for the group. "What’s been happening here is basic neglect."

These lands are important to protect, says Ed Alverson of The Nature Conservancy, because Mount Pisgah is the largest remaining site for open prairie, oak savanna, and oak woodlands in the Willamette Valley.

High Country News
November 13, 2001
Along with their weekly outings to the area to chop back invasive brush, the group’s 138 volunteers hunt invasive bullfrogs with flashlights and spears in the middle of the night, destroying their eggs; they also trap and euthanize feral cats. The group is planting a floodplain with cottonwoods to restore a river channeled by levees to its natural, braided form. To get involved, contact Friends of Buford Park and Mount Pisgah at 541/344-8350, or e-mail them at fbp@efn.org.