ANYONE who met Nate Murphy would think he had lived and breathed dinosaurs all his life. He’s the sort of man who stands out in a crowd: stocky, outgoing and invariably wearing a straw hat and shorts. He never claimed to be a dinosaur scientist, just a regular guy with a love for fossils and a knack for finding them.
Such enthusiastic amateur fossil hunters play a crucial role in the palaeontological ecosystem. They roam the wide open spaces of places like Montana, spotting fossils and digging bones side by side with the professionals. They share the camaraderie of the camp and the thrill of uncovering fossils. And once in a while they make spectacular discoveries, like , an exceptionally well preserved “dinosaur mummy” complete with the remains of its last meal.
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Even before Murphy made the headlines with that find in 2002, he had become part of the palaeontology scene in Montana, a large, sparsely populated state that is exceptionally rich in dinosaurs. He ran dinosaur-digging tours which charged “volunteers” upwards of $1500 a week, and was director of palaeontology at the small, not-for-profit in Malta, a town of 1800 people in the north-east of the state.
After finding Leonardo, Murphy talked of building a new museum around his discoveries to bolster the area’s fragile economy. More discoveries followed, and the one-time carpet cleaner seemed on the road to scientific success.
That was until a small but spectacular fossil nicknamed Sid Vicious brought Murphy to grief. Early this year, Murphy pleaded guilty to the serious crimes of stealing fossils from private and federal land, earning him fines and a jail sentence. This is the story of his rise and fall, and how it has damaged the vital trust among professional palaeontologists, amateurs and the owners of the land they scour for fossils.
Nathan Lee Murphy was born in the late 1950s and grew up in California and Alaska. In 1983 he moved to Montana after marrying a woman from Saco. He first settled in Whitefish, where he opened a carpet-cleaning business. In 1989 he moved to Great Falls and eventually, in 1992, to Malta. By then he was a partner in a company which sold carpet-cleaning supplies across the state.
The Malta region had been famed for its dinosaurs since the late 19th century when legendary palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope discovered the Judith River formation, which is packed with late Cretaceous fossils. When Murphy arrived, dinosaurs were back in the headlines. In May 1992, federal agents in the neighbouring state of South Dakota had seized the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, named Sue, in an ownership dispute. The fossil was said to be worth millions of dollars.
Energy and enthusiasm
Murphy quickly got himself noticed. He had energy, enthusiasm and more knowledge of dinosaurs than you might expect from someone in the carpet-cleaning trade, and was soon urging the Phillips County Museum in Malta to open a dinosaur exhibit. He lacked formal training, but claimed that as a child he had gone on fossil-hunting trips with a bona fide palaeontologist – his grandmother Nelda Wright. Although far from a household name, Wright was a long-time assistant to eminent Harvard palaeontologist Alfred Romer and a founding member of The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Murphy spent a lot of his spare time hunting for fossils on his in-laws’ ranch near Saco, and in 1993 he set up a business, the , to take tourists on dinosaur digs around Malta.
The following year one of those digs hit pay dirt – an of a 75 million-year-old hadrosaur called Brachylophosaurus canadensis. The species was already known from fragmentary remains, but Murphy’s 10-metre fossil was complete except for a missing chunk of tail. The bones were articulated and had survived fossilisation without much distortion. Murphy dubbed the fossil “Elvis” because its pelvis was exceptionally well preserved. The discovery gave him his first modest brush with fame.
It also gave him his first taste of trouble. He originally claimed that Elvis was found on private land, which meant that the landowner could give permission to dig and was the rightful owner of the fossil. But examination of the site showed that it was actually on federal land, where fossils are government property and excavation requires a permit. Murphy didn’t have one.
That was a serious mistake, albeit an easy one to make in the days before GPS was readily available. Some Montana ranches sprawl across tens of thousands of hectares, many ranchers lease federal land for grazing, and many boundaries are unmarked. Yet it was also an odd mistake for someone who claimed to have worked on geological mapping surveys, including one for the US Geological Survey. Shouldn’t he have known better?
Government officials confiscated Elvis and turned it over to the at Montana State University in Bozeman. Stealing fossils from federal land is a criminal offence, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, but Murphy got away with a telling off. Perhaps that emboldened him for his later misdeeds.
“Stealing fossils from federal land is a criminal offence, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Murphy got away with a telling off”
By 1997, Murphy was running his fossil-tour business out of the Phillips County Museum, where he had recently become director of palaeontology. The lines between his museum work and business were hazy, but Murphy said the fossils he found would go to the museum and set up a non-profit organisation to take care of them. That was good enough in rural Montana, where people are used to working two or three jobs to make ends meet and saw no problem in someone being a museum curator, running fossil-hunting tours and selling carpet-cleaning supplies at the same time.
Sue Frary, director of exhibits and programmes at the , next door to the Phillips County Museum in Malta, says that Murphy had earned the respect of Malta’s residents, who hadn’t paid much heed to dinosaurs until Murphy began digging them up. “He drew attention to the finds, got some press and encouraged the community to get behind him,” she says.
As a big fish in a very small pond, Murphy was drawn into other projects, including a messy dispute over fossils found on a ranch in Fort Peck. Keith Rigby, a palaeontologist at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, had discovered the site in 1996. He returned in 1997 with a crew of volunteers and permission to dig from the Walton family, who had lived there for generations. He hired family members as cooks, and his volunteers helped on the farm. But problems emerged after his crew uncovered the remains of a T. rex.
The earlier battle over “Tyrannosaurus Sue” had shown that fossils could be worth serious money. When Rigby belatedly checked records, he discovered the government had taken ownership of most of the ranch, including the fossil site, in 1994 after the Waltons had fallen behind on government farm loans. Rigby obtained federal permission to dig, but did not have time to excavate the remains during the field season.
Exactly what happened next remains unclear, but for some reason Murphy reopened the dig. Murphy later admitted that he had spent a day excavating, but said he was trying to protect the bones from damage by unskilled excavators using heavy equipment.
Somebody had apparently hoped to dig up the fossil and sell it. Murphy said he tried unsuccessfully to warn Rigby, but did contact independent palaeontologist Bob Bakker, who “concurred with me that we should take the specimen out and at least it wouldn’t be damaged”.
The skeleton would have been “bulldozed and backhoed”, likely destroying it, Bakker replied when we contacted him. “Nate was the only trained field collector on the spot, and he seemed to have the right idea – to plaster-jacket the stuff to preserve it and hope that the proper authorities would rescue the bones.” The fossil was eventually excavated by Rigby and now belongs to , a non-profit group affiliated with the University of Montana.
The mummy returns
In 1998, Murphy found fertile new hunting grounds on the 15,000 hectare ranch of Howie and JoAnn Hammond near Malta, close to the Elvis site, about half of which was leased federal land. He made a handshake deal with the Hammonds promising to share proceeds from any discoveries and began taking tours to the parts of the ranch where he didn’t need a federal permit to dig. In 2000, one of his clients, Dan Stephenson, spotted a stunning fossil – a nearly complete dinosaur that Murphy dubbed “Leonardo”.
Like Elvis, Leonardo was a specimen of Brachylophosaurus, but unlike Elvis the fossil also preserved much of the animal’s skin and soft tissue as well as the bones. Such fossils are often called mummies, though they were preserved by quick burial and mineralisation in a moist environment rather than desiccation. Dinosaur mummies are incredibly rare and scientifically valuable, offering insights into dinosaur biology not available from skeletons.
It was, in short, the sort of treasure that can make its discoverer famous and perhaps even rich. Murphy was quick to realise this. So were the Hammonds, who insisted Murphy sign a contract which split ownership 50-50.
To get Leonardo out, Murphy enlisted the aid of professional palaeontologist Dave Trexler, then of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, and his geologist colleague Mark Thompson. Progress was slow, and it wasn’t until the following summer that they could excavate the fossil. After covering the 6.7-metre-long dinosaur with tonnes of plaster and a steel frame, they hoisted it onto a tilt-bed truck and hauled it back to the Phillips County Museum. Murphy displayed photos of the fossil at The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s 2001 annual meeting in Bozeman. However, he had little other information, so Leonardo attracted little attention.
Leonardo finally hit the headlines at the society’s annual meeting the following year in Norman, Oklahoma, when Murphy and Thompson presented a paper and held a press conference. Despite the fact that Leonardo was nearly all Trexler’s work, Trexler wasn’t there. Researchers crowded around the poster to see photos and descriptions. Dinosaur mummies are very rare; only three had been reported before, and one of those wound up at the bottom of the Atlantic after the ship carrying it was sunk during the first world war. Leonardo was more complete than any of the others, and much of the body was preserved in three dimensions. Even its last meal was preserved in its gut, another first.
The soft-tissue preservation was a tremendous opportunity for palaeontologists, Murphy told the press conference with enthusiasm. “We don’t have a lot of specimens to tell what this can tell.” Full preparation would take a couple more years, he said.
It was a great debut performance for Leonardo and Murphy. We met Murphy for the first time there, separately, and he left a lasting impression on both of us. He was in fine spirits at a Mexican restaurant one evening at the conference, regaling a group that included Bakker with tales of field work with his grandmother and playing with the legendary rock band Country Joe and the Fish.
Leonardo was only one in a string of successes for Murphy’s expeditions. Another was a young adult Brachylophosaurus, , which was fully articulated and nearly 90 per cent complete. Then came , a juvenile, and Yoda, an infant. Murphy’s expeditions had vastly expanded our knowledge of this little-known species.
Groups he led found other rarities. One was the well-preserved skull and neck of a new species of sauropod from the Jurassic, tens of millions of years older than Leonardo. Other probable new species included two stegosaurs and a crocodile, which have yet to be scientifically described.
Yet all the while trouble was brewing. In July 2002, Thompson found what looked like another important dinosaur fossil on the Hammond ranch, a turkey-sized predatory “raptor” that – unlike most fossils of its size – had not had its bones crushed. Thompson called it “Julieraptor” after his sister, took photos of the site and collected a few bones. Murphy asked Thompson not to tell the Hammonds about it yet because he was negotiating a new contract. It was the start of a string of evasions and lies that would end with Murphy in jail.
Growing ambition
As Murphy’s list of discoveries grew so did his ambitions. He quietly shunted Trexler to the sidelines, telling him nothing was happening with Leonardo, then tried to enlist higher-profile palaeontologists to promote the find.
His promotional push started at the 2002 Oklahoma meeting. The evening before the press conference, Bakker introduced Murphy to one of us – Joe Iacuzzo, then the editor of the Jurassic Park Institute project at Universal Pictures, a high-profile position with connections that could bring Leonardo into the public eye. Within weeks, Iacuzzo, Murphy and Bakker met in Las Vegas with executives from Clear Channel Communications to discuss a Leonardo exhibition. The company paid Murphy $25,000 up front to secure exclusive rights to the dinosaur while they worked out a formal agreement, but the deal was never finalised. Negotiations with a second company also collapsed. It was during these discussions that Murphy confided to Iacuzzo that he had found a spectacular new predatory dinosaur on the Hammond ranch, but couldn’t say any more about it yet.
“The company paid $25,000 to secure exclusive rights to the dinosaur while they worked out a formal agreement, but the deal was never finalised”
Documentary company MPH Entertainment were the next to get involved. They twice sent film crews to Malta to shoot the growing Leonardo science team. During one session Iacuzzo asked after the new raptor, but Murphy wouldn’t take him to it or show him the bones, saying he was having trouble negotiating with the Hammonds and didn’t want anyone knowing where the fossil was.
MPH soon pulled out too, despite having paid Murphy nearly $20,000 as well as covering the costs of filming. They told Iacuzzo that Murphy was too “erratic”.
In 2003, Thompson, now living in Australia, returned to Montana hoping to work on Julieraptor, but Murphy diverted him to other projects. Back in Australia, Thompson asked repeatedly about the fossil, but Murphy kept telling him nothing was happening. Eventually, in 2006, Murphy told Thompson he was ready to dig, only to change his mind at the last minute, forcing Thompson to cancel his flight. A few weeks later he stunned Thompson by telling him that he had excavated the site but found nothing worth mentioning. Thompson began to suspect something was wrong.
That October, the Leonardo team gathered in Malta to take high-resolution X-ray images of the mummy’s interior. While they had the X-ray equipment, Murphy asked them to image a block encased in plaster, which he said came from a ranch in Saco. He said the fossil was a turtle, and seemed surprised when the X-rays showed the bones of a small raptor dinosaur, which he quickly dubbed “Sid Vicious”. The fossil reminded Iacuzzo and Bakker of the small raptor from the Hammond ranch that Murphy had earlier extolled, and they felt uneasy.
Things finally came to a head in February 2007, when Murphy attempted to sack Iacuzzo as head of the Leonardo project and replace him with his new girlfriend.
Stunned and upset, Iacuzzo called another former Leonardo project member, Tim Quarles. As they compared notes, disturbing patterns emerged. Murphy got uneasy if people asked too many questions. He repeatedly squeezed long-time colleagues out of the project in favour of newcomers. He accused the Hammonds of being greedy, but no one else saw them that way.
Then one of them mentioned Julieraptor. Murphy had said that was a dud, but then produced a new raptor fossil as if from nowhere. Sid Vicious had supposedly come from a different site, but small well-preserved raptors are exceedingly rare and the two fossils sounded surprisingly similar.
Quarles knew that Thompson had photographed the Julieraptor site, so they called and got copies of the pictures. Then they showed the photos to the Hammonds, and also to the in Hill City, South Dakota, where Murphy had sent Sid Vicious for preparation. Comparing the photos with the fossil left no doubt that Sid Vicious and Julieraptor were one and the same. Days later, the Black Hills Institute handed the fossil to law enforcement officials and began cooperating with a criminal investigation.
The Hammonds likewise were stunned. They contacted the Phillips County Attorney, who referred the case to state prosecutors and to the federal Bureau of Land Management, which was already investigating illegal fossil digs on federal land.
Murphy finally admitted he had taken the raptor from the Hammond ranch. In a final twist, it turned out that he had actually stolen it not from the Hammonds, but from their neighbour, Bruce Bruckner: Thompson had collected GPS data on the fossil site and it turned out to be on land the Hammonds leased from Bruckner, who had not given Murphy permission to dig. On 9 March this year, Murphy pleaded guilty to stealing the fossil, for which he was sentenced to 60 days in jail and fined $2500.
Guilty as charged
That was not the full extent of Murphy’s thieving. While pursuing the case of the missing raptor, investigators discovered that he had also taken fossils from two sites on federal land near the Hammond ranch. On 14 April, Murphy to stealing fossils from federal land, and was to 300 hours community service and fined $17,325. This time Murphy had no excuse. GPS was readily available and the two sites were less than 300 metres from the Elvis site, which Murphy had learned the hard way was on federal land.
Theft was not Murphy’s only misdeed. His manipulations delayed the study of some spectacular fossils. Although he preached the importance of collecting extensive field data, an inventory of the 140 or so fossils that his teams had collected from the Hammond ranch found no information on any of them, greatly reducing their scientific value. Some fossils have simply disappeared.
Fact-checking for this article revealed yet more evasions. Surviving relatives say Nelda Wright never had children and died more than a decade after Murphy said she did. Joe McDonald, front man of Country Joe and the Fish, had never heard of him.
Julieraptor, meanwhile, is back at the Black Hills Institute, which is seeking a buyer on Bruckner’s behalf. It is not yet clear whether it is a new species.
People who knew Murphy are puzzled by his behaviour. When told we were trying to understand him, both Frary and Trexler, now at the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana, said simply, “good luck”. Others remain angry about his evasions, thefts and manipulation.
Palaeontologists often quarrel among themselves, but they welcome others who share their interests. They initially accepted Murphy because of his talent and enthusiasm. “Nate had no book-learning about anatomy or sedimentology, but his autodidactic skills in excavating were impressive,” says Bakker. “That’s what makes the whole scheme so sad. He had good quarrying expertise and attracted specialists to the Malta museum. Funds and scholarly help poured in. He didn’t have to steal. Or lie.”
Murphy’s misdeeds have added to underlying tensions between professional palaeontologists and the amateurs who have long worked beside them. If an amateur as serious-seeming as Murphy would steal and sell fossils, can others be trusted?
The reaction of landowners is another concern. Long before Murphy’s thefts were exposed, academic palaeontologists were already losing access to private land because financially stressed owners needed the money offered by commercial fossil-hunters. Will landowners still cooperate with people who call themselves scientists after seeing one supposed museum palaeontologist steal from one of their own and get hauled off to jail?
Perhaps most deeply, Murphy has hurt the small, independent local museums that he professed to love. For decades, out-of-state palaeontologists had been coming to Montana to plunder its dinosaur fossils. At last the state had begun growing its own museums. Murphy was their champion, saying that local museums should follow the ethical standards for preserving fossils set by The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Yet in the end, he proved to be a fraud.
Had he started out as a con artist trying to strike it rich? Perhaps. But although he was a gifted fossil hunter, Murphy wasn’t a very good crook. “His thievery was done so haphazardly that he left mountains of clues,” says Bakker. And so what started out as a love affair with dinosaurs ended as a tragic waste of potential.
