As the last days of July 1902 ticked away in Hell Creek, Montana, Barnum Brown found himself torn. The party uncovered a Triceratops skull that was in decent condition, though its horns were missing. With enough work, it could be “a fine exhibition specimen,” he wrote to Osborn, knowing that would begin to make up for the crushed fossil now sitting in the museum in New York. If anything, the skull would buy him at least one more year of employment.
But he wanted more. Never one to be satisfied with what he had in hand, Brown felt compelled to brave another ravine, search another hillside, climb over the side of another cliff if doing so meant that he would come closer to a specimen that would put the trajectory of his life back on its upward tracks. As the temperature soared above 100 degrees, Brown worked without stopping, the contours of his face slowly disappearing behind accumulated layers of grime and dust.
Since childhood he had acted as if he had an unspoken trust that the universe would bend in his favor when he needed it. Each morning he stepped out of his tent seemed to be another plea that his luck would return.
As July faded into August, Brown attacked a sandstone hill he called Sheba Mountain with a plow and scraper, determined to satisfy his curiosity about what lay beneath. Its particular composition of stone and its location near what was once an inland sea fit the profile of a promising fossil bed. Once Brown began to dig, however, the rock proved incredibly hard, seemingly impervious to any blade. Unable to let it alone, he sent an assistant to Miles City to come back with enough dynamite to blow off all the hillside above what he hoped would be the bone layer.
Brown was not in the habit of blasting away at every spot that gave him trouble, but this time—whether due to frustration, intrigue or a combination of the two—he had to know what secret the Earth was protecting with such ferocity. He laid the explosives, set the timer and waited. The blast echoed among the ravines of the badlands, reverberating like distant thunder. A dark cloud of dust and dirt hung in the air, so thick that he could taste sand on his tongue.
Once the smoke cleared, he edged closer to the lip of the quarry, staring into the deep hole he had created. It was nothing less than a time machine, bridging the 60-million-year gap between the age of the dinosaurs and our own. As he looked down into the pit, Brown took in a shape that no human being had ever laid eyes on. “Quarry No. 1 contains the femur, pubes, [partial] humerus, three vertebrae, and two undetermined bones of a large Carnivorous Dinosaur not described by Marsh,” Brown wrote in a letter that evening to Osborn. “I have never seen anything like it.”