The Dig at Polecat Bench: Summer, 1961

Prof. Glenn L. Jepsen, trim, graying, older than I'd expected, led me down to the basement of the museum at Princeton and pulled out an intricate golf-ball-sized skull from one of the Paleocene drawers. Using a pocket magnifying glass, he showed me the structure of tiny bones around the ear, but his explanation quickly outpaced my grasp of cranial anatomy.

"We'll be looking for more of these," he said dryly.

Then, after reviewing my background—the early fascination with dinosaurs and my volunteer work at Yale's Peabody Museum—Jepsen asked me whether I thought I could hold up over ten weeks of digging out in the Wyoming badlands. "It goes well up over 100 degrees out there," he warned, "and there's no shade to speak of."

I brought up my camping trip to the Southwest a few summers before and told him the heat hadn't bothered me. As an aside, I conceded that toward the end of that trip I'd fallen off a cliff.

"Really? Any broken bones?"

"Just my skull."

I'd hoped to pass this off as a joke, but Jepsen held up a hand for me to stand still, took my chin between thumb and forefinger and directed it to the side. He was a patient man, a careful observer, and as he continued to check me out, noting the crook in my nose, my blue-gray eyes, and teenage acne, I wondered if he thought he could penetrate my character by scrutinizing the contours of my skull.

It was only a tiny fracture, I explained, and had never shown up on the x-rays. True, I'd been unconscious for three days, but I was okay now, I insisted—adding that I really wanted to go on the expedition.

Apparently satisfied, Jepsen said that he had reservations about my youth, but since he was short of hands and I had a strong recommendation from Dr. Gregory of Yale, he was willing to take me along. Then, as we moved toward the staircase, he asked: "By the way, Mr. Morgan, what is your family's religion?"

The anti-Semitism at Princeton was no secret. The Times had run articles about discrimination at the eating clubs there. But I found it hard to believe that a scientist like Jepsen would have anything to do with it. Didn't science require an objective, facts-based point of view?

"We're not religious," I said after a pause.

"That's not what I meant—as you well know!" His face reddened. "You aren't by any chance Jewish, are you?" His anger startled me, although it's true I had tried to duck his question. He obviously wasn't having any of that.

While being Jewish had little to do with who I thought I was—we celebrated Christmas rather than Hanukkah and I'd only attended one Friday night service, nearly ten years before—still, my family was Jewish in the racial sense that Jepsen had in mind.

When I conceded as much, the professor turned and walked away. We were in a dim-lit corner of the basement near the staircase, and an image of an SS officer interrogating a wartime prisoner flickered briefly in my mind. But this was America, not Nazi Germany. How could it be happening here?

Jepsen returned and, facing me again, said coldly that he would have to rethink our arrangement. I asked what he meant.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Morgan, but under the circumstances I'm afraid you won't be able to come on the expedition after all."

"But I thought we'd agreed!"

Jepsen shrugged. It was as if we had entered a different geological era, a new ice age perhaps, in which prior categories no longer applied.

Stunned, holding back tears, I asked how I was supposed to explain this to my folks.

He waved his hand dismissively. "Tell them whatever you like."

But I wasn't ready to give up. "Well, what about Prof. Gregory?"

Jepsen stared at me. In the small world of vertebrate paleontology, he...