THE SLEEPING GIANT

Today was one of those days, increasingly frequent of late, that I picked-up the morning paper and immediately asked myself what I had been doing for the last 37 years. Right there, in the center column that the Wall Street Journal reserves for sometimes humorous but always off-beat and certainly off-Wall Street stories, appeared the headline:

Dinosaur Hunter Seeks More Than Just Bare Bones
Prof. Horner Searches for Traces of Blood, DNA; Lucky Break From T. Rex

Dateline: Jordan, Montana

Now why should this create a moment of existential angst?

Several reasons. Professor Horner* is one of those rare and fortunate individuals who have been able to pursue a dream that began in childhood and pursue that dream in a place he dearly loves. In contrast, as Jared Diamond noted in his book Collapse, Montana grows children for export along with cattle, sheep, wheat and copper, mainly because the economy is not strong enough to provide jobs. As a result, more people alive today grew up in Montana than live there now. I am one of the exports.

Next, the article goes on to recount the exciting work with his colleague, Professor Mary Schweitzer, that appears to hold open the possibility that DNA might be sufficiently preserved in the marrow of a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex bone to be analyzed. As the WSJ put it in their graphic Paleontology Lesson "Analysis of soft tissue found in the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex revealed that proteins were virtually identical to modern birds. Bone from the modern emu was virtually identical in structure, orientation and even color." In short, even if we don't know that a T-Rex tastes like chicken, it certainly has a similar genetic blueprint.

Mary grew up in Montana in the same small town and went to the same schools that I went to. She was also exported, to North Carolina State University. In her case, however, she at least gets to spend her summer months doing fieldwork in Montana, albeit in the badlands. The Hell Creek formation where the T. Rex bone was found is aptly named. Less rain falls there than in the Sahara Desert. Jordan, the nearest town, had a population of 364 in 2000. No River Jordan flows through it, though sometimes a trickle appears in Big Dry Creek.

Another aptly named formation, the Sleeping Giant, dominates the horizon north east of Helena, my hometown.** The formation invites stories and legends. Here is one that I may have heard, or maybe I am just making it up. The giant went to sleep in the last days of the dinosaur. He was a mighty hunter and had a very big appetite. Like the great bear, when food became scarce, he knew he had to hibernate to survive. So he found a great valley next to his drinking place on the Missouri and laid down to rest. From time to time, when someone pulls from the earth the bones of one of his great kills, dreams disturb his sleep and the earth shakes as it did with devastating effect in 1935 and again when Quake Lake was formed on August 17, 1959, the night before my oldest niece was born.***

Now to the point. Dinosaurs as iconic symbols of Darwinian evolutionary theory have become the poster children for seismic faults in American culture, politics and religion. Supposedly, one cannot subscribe both to the concept of God, including the attribute of Creator, and to the theory of evolution as the result of natural selection. So we are asked to join opposing armies in this cultural, religious and political war: science or religion, Republican or Democrat, Red state or Blue state, pro-life or pro-choice, intelligent design or unintelligible chaos, a purpose driven life or a meaningless existence.

In the next few weeks, I invite you to the white water to see if we can find the clear channel through this cultural divide. The choices may be false ones. We will explore the river carefully and provisionally, having a great deal of respect for the rocks and shoals in the stream and the vabtage points from the shore. We will attempt to navigate the river, not try to blast our way through it.




*To see a short list of Professor Horner's scientific publications, go to http://www.montana.edu/wwwes/facstaff/horner.htm. He has also written or co-written many books for the educated lay reader.

**To see the Sleeping Giant on web cam go to http://www.deq.state.mt.us/webcam/photos/met_041129_110000.jpg.

***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Lake.