Larger than life: Local’s Diplodocus fossil a valuable window into the past

Burgess’ ‘rock account’ represents millions of years of history

By Steve Van Kooten

Phil Burgess lives on the east side of Prairie du Chien, tucked into a residential neighborhood a block off Marquette Road. From the outside, walking up to the front door, his house doesn’t look like it holds more bones than a mausoleum.

But when Burgess opens the door and you walk through the living room, the halls, the kitchen, and even into his bedroom, there are fossils and rocks everywhere.

And I mean everywhere: Burgess estimates he has 100,000 specimens in his house, yard and garage. He lives in a scientific gold mine.

“When I was a little kid, my older sisters would get me books from the Smithsonian Library or places like that, and [the books] would be about the moon or different kinds of dinosaurs or geology in general,” he said, “and that piqued my interest.”

His interest turned into a hobby, and for more than 50 years, he has scoured parts of the Driftless Area, looking for new specimens. Some of his oldest fossils go back almost 500 million years — well before the dinosaurs were a twinkle in the universe’s eye.

“I went from a shoebox to a room to a house full, and even that’s not enough,” he said. “I would go out up in the hills and in quarries with sledgehammers and planks, and I would find something to take out.”

One of his prized fossils sits on the dresser in his bedroom: a four-foot-long femur belonging to a dinosaur called Diplodocus. The bone, preserved in blue agate, weighs approximately 150 pounds and is a rare specimen from the Morrison Formation, a series of sedimentary rocks that stretch from Montana down to New Mexico, according to Burgess’ notes.

“What is unique is that it has both of its end joints preserved. Even in museums, that is really hard to come across,” he said.

Burgess did not pull the femur out of the ground, as he has done with many others in his collection; instead, he bought it from a long-time collector.

“I saved up for ages to get this,” he said. “It’s in really good shape; most bones are crumbly and have to be hardened, or they’re collapsed and crushed. This one is pretty well preserved, and it’s big. I was talking about this with another collector the other day. Some people are after quality. A diamond is small, but it can be worth millions of dollars, or you can have a 300-pound rock in your yard that’s worth nothing. But I’ve always liked the big stuff.”

A Big Boy

The Diplodocus was an herbivorous sauropod from the same family as the Apatosaurus — formerly known as a Brontosaurus — that lived between 145 and 155 million years ago. They looked similar: they had long tails, long necks, small heads, and, most notably, they were massive animals. They nicknamed Brontosaurus the thunder lizard because it was so large that the earth must have trembled underneath its feet. The Diplodocus was leaner, though still physically prodigious, at a relatively svelte 23 tons. From tip-to-tail, scientists estimate it could grow as long as 108 feet.

“Diplodocus lived in the Jurassic period, and its bones are found in what is now a desert,” Burgess said. “Utah was a swampy area, and these critters were munchers. They would grab up big mouthfuls of vegetation like a cow would.”

He added that sauropods likely ate a large amount of food every day: “If you’re a big, ponderous dinosaur, you know, 20-25 tons, it takes a lot of energy to move.”

Paleontologists think it traveled in herds, lived in areas with thick vegetation and warded off predators with a combination of its large size and long tail. And while a healthy adult Diplodocus would have been a formidable foe against any threat, their eggs and elderly members of their herd were likely easier prey for contemporary carnivorous species.

The massive girth of sauropod dinosaurs must have served them well during the Mesozoic era because their basic body type did not change much over their evolutionary history, according to Kristina Rogers, a professor of biology and geology at Macalester College and sauropod expert.

“Early in their evolutionary history (about 200 million years ago), sauropods had already developed their large body size, herbivorous lifestyle, long necks and tails and quadrupedal stance,” she wrote. “This basic set-up stuck around throughout their incredibly long evolutionary history — even the late surviving Cretaceous titanosaurs still had this basic body plan.”

Doing it right

Dinosaur fossils are not a common thing to find, and for that reason, the preservation and documentation of their remains is a crucial part of paleontology. Removal of specimens without proper documentation reduces their scientific value.

“What you have, no matter how big or showy or valuable or rare it is, if you don’t have it documented what formation it is from or its locality, it’s just a coffee table piece,” said Burgess.

Burgess is a hobbyist — or amateur — but that doesn’t mean he takes rocks out of the ground and puts them on the shelf to collect dust. Instead, he has been cataloging his specimens since 1969. Now, he has approximately 15,000 photographed and researched.

“It’s a painstaking process,” he said, “but you have to have it documented for it to have any value.”

“There is a limited amount of information available about these animals,” Paul Sereno, professor, paleontologist and archaeologist at the University of Chicago, said. “Now, if you take a bone or a clam or something from its site, the range might be less, and the variation might be lost. So, there’s a lot of ways that detract from the science.”

Sereno believes enthusiasts are an overall positive to paleontological science, but he also said rare dinosaur fossils should be accessible to the public.

“Fossils should belong to everybody,” he said. “They’re not like gems or minerals; they’re unique. They’re windows to the past that will be studied for generations. We’re lucky to have them.”

More to learn

So, what can a scientist learn from a fossil anyway?

Paleontologists can glean a voluminous amount of information from a bone, everything from an animal’s skeletal structure to clues about its contemporary environment, climate, how it moved, what it ate, what might have ate it — you get the idea. Small details can lead to big answers.

Bones can have clues about an animal’s soft tissues, like muscle attachments and skin or spots where horns were attached to the skeleton.

“That’s why we have to collect the fossil with the greatest amount of care. Because everyone once in a while, there might be a skin impression or something,” said Sereno.

“One of the cool things we can do is extract a small piece of the mid-shaft of that bone and create a very thin slick — a thin section — so that we can see through it under a light microscope. Inside, we’ll see the preserved spaces where blood vessels and cells sat back in the Jurassic when Diplodocus was alive. These things tell us about how the animal grew throughout its life,” said Rogers.

One fossil can tell a story: how the animal may have moved, what other parts of its anatomy looked like and how big the animal was at different phases of its life cycle. But one bone can’t tell the whole story, so paleontologists may compare multiple specimens to answer more questions.

“We rarely have all of the animals. It’s like a murder scene: you’ve got dead animals that are partial, and you overlap them to get a better picture of it,” said Sereno.

Even with a complete skeleton, the bones can’t tell the whole story. Paleontologists will use analogs: modern animals that are either closely related to prehistoric species or feature similar physical characteristics.

Those living analogs help paleontologists fill in the gaps about dinosaur behavior. The similarities between a chicken and Tyrannosaurus leg bone, for instance, can help them understand the way the dinosaur walked, how fast it could run and how it balanced itself.

“Behavior is one of the most difficult things to fossilize; you won’t find a running Tyrannosaurus rex in the fossil record, so we have to interpret that behavior from the bones,” Sereno said. “The field of paleontology is very appealing because it is about the visualization of what no one can see.”

“When it comes to reconstructing things like behavior and soft parts in dinosaur paleobiology, we usually rely on a couple different types of living analogs,” wrote Rogers.

Dinosaurs’ closest modern relatives are crocodiles and birds, but scientists can use other animals with similar physical attributes. For the Diplodocus, scientists study the behavior of elephants, giraffes and other large herbivores, as well as whales, which are the only modern animals to reach the same size as sauropods.

Paleontologists use those comparisons to make digital models. They layer information from the physical structure of the bones, the analogs’ behavior and biology and other information to extrapolate theories that draw from a myriad of scientific disciplines.

“Because our record of them will never be complete as seeing a living animal in person, we have to employ so many different fields of science (geology, biology, chemistry and physics) to learn what we can from their remains,” wrote Rogers.

Paleontologists’ research on contemporary animals and prehistoric life helps inform modern scientific study.

“Paleontologists are at the forefront of studying modern animals in a way that people who study modern animals have never bothered,” said Sereno.

For Kids

While the Diplodocus is not as much a part of the cultural lexicon as Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus or Triceratops, sauropods have been featured in popular fiction since their discovery. One of the first animated cartoons, “Gertie, the Dinosaur,” depicted a long-neck dinosaur traveling a prehistoric landscape and eating whole trees. In 1925, a silent movie called “The Lost World” depicted a fight between a long-neck sauropod and a carnivorous theropod. Since then, dinosaurs like Diplodocus have been featured in countless movies, books, video games and toys, where they continue to inspire children and adults.

“These are things that can turn a kid into a scientist or might lead to a lifelong passion or become the trustee of a museum,” said Sereno. “These things have lifelong effects.”

Heidi Reams, a conservationist and naturalist that works for the Fossil and Prairie Reserve in Floyd County, Iowa, said fossils are real-life examples of history that can make an interactive connection to the past.

“It gets them outside and gives them an opportunity to explore things,” she said. “It helps with the stories that they retell about the history of our area.”

Dinosaurs and their remains are a gateway into the scientific world. For many young people, the first time they see a dinosaur or get to touch one of their bones becomes a defining experience. When Burgess saw dinosaurs in the books given to him by his sisters, it fueled a lifetime of investigation and discovery. That world keeps expanding and changing, only limited by scientists’ creativity.

“This type of interactive science requires creativity, and, of course, imagination is what allows us to bring dinosaurs to life,” wrote Rogers.

“The exciting part is you could learn this one way in high school, learn it another way in college and then you’re helping your kids with their homework and they’re learning something different,” Reams said. “It’s always changing.”

Back to Phil

“I have been doing this all of my life,” said Burgess. “Hopefully, all this rare stuff will get donated to a place in New York, where they will make it available to students, collectors and scientists to study it. I would like to take the larger pieces and the display items here, and at some point, if an organization is willing, I’d like them displayed locally.”

Burgess doesn’t just collect rocks and bones. Throughout the year, he conducts presentations about fossils and prehistoric history at places like the Wetlands Center in Marquette, Iowa, and the Yellow River State Forest. He also has an exhibit named after him at the Fort Crawford Museum. Through the years, schools have brought classes to his home to look at his specimens. He still welcomes visitors to stop by and see them all. He also disseminates some of his information online for other hobbyists and professionals.

“I’m getting responses from scientists in Germany, Australia and different places in the United States. There are people scattered all over the globe that do this, but I’m pretty much the only one who does this in this part of the States — that collects and actively studies it,” he added.

Even at 74 years old, Burgess talks about the thrill of finding a new specimen in the rocks around the Driftless Area. He compares it to a runner’s high.

“It’s true. You get back, and you’re sore and sweaty. You feel like you have been out running a marathon and say, ‘Wow, I did it. I got this thing out,’” said Burgess. “It gets in your blood. So, I suppose some millionaires get a high seeing how much money they can get in their stock accounts, but I have a rock account.”

There are still thousands of pieces left on his property to clean, catalog and store, and Phil aims to get as much of it done as he can so that future generations can use his work to better understand the way the world used to be. The bones may not tell the whole story, but they can tell a lot about Burgess’ journey from curious kid to studious enthusiast.

“You go through school and you get a job, and you knock on wood that you’re going to retire with most of your marbles intact so that you can do stuff like this,” Burgess said. “Now, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”