The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans

6. The Birth of a Ghost Lineage

6 The Birth of a Ghost Lineage Ifell in love with Wyoming the first time I saw the place. Back then, I could never have predicted that Wyoming’s vast, open basin and range country would play such a pivotal role in my career. But this is hardly surprising, since I also had no idea what type of career I might pursue. Like a lot of boys entering their awkward teenage years, I was far more interested in sports than science. Growing up in the 1970s in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, backyard basketball filled most of my free time. Dean Smith and his constant retinue of star athletes at the University of North Carolina earned my boyhood idolatry. Fossils seemed as remote as outer space. In fact, in the highly metamorphosed belt of rocks where I grew up, my chances of finding a fossil were roughly equivalent to finding a bit of meteorite or some other wayward souvenir from the cosmos. Still, I’ll never forget the first time I saw Wyoming. My family was on vacation in the summer of 1976, driving west toward the Rocky Mountains in a station wagon equipped with a dubious air conditioner. We had already made the obligatory stops along Interstate 90 in western South Dakota. Wall Drug, with its carpet-bombing approach to billboard advertising, was a bit of a disappointment for me. On the other hand, the endless sea of White River badlands on display in Badlands National 142 Park justified the long, hot drive across the Great Plains. A few days in the alpine splendor of the Black Hills allowed us to catch our breath before embarking forYellowstone. Not long after we crossed the Wyoming state line, I saw the summit of an enormous column of rock off on the northern horizon. The road map informed us that the odd geological feature had to be Devil’s Tower. Instead of detouring for a closer look, we continued west across the immense expanse of sagebrush and rolling prairie that makes up the Powder River Basin. Its starkly surreal landscapes captivated me. Abundant herds of pronghorn, with their eponymous headgear, looking like nothing else but a living fossil, caused my mind to wander. I imagined that our station wagon had been caught up in some type of time warp. As we drove on toward the distant crest of the Bighorn Range, we might just as well have been traversing the millennia back to the Miocene. Years later, once it became clear that my aptitude for science far exceeded my prospects in basketball, I rediscovered the interest in fossils that I had first developed as a youngster. Like many kids, by the time I enrolled in first grade, I could name more species of dinosaurs than my teachers thought had ever existed. My father, a biology teacher at one of the local high schools, had instigated my early fascination with fossils by reading me bedtime stories featuring all kinds of prehistoric beasts. After repeated bouts of career-oriented soul-searching in college, I eventually admitted that what I really wanted to do was paleontology. Only later did I learn that I could combine my childhood fixation on fossils with my inordinate fondness for Wyoming. That, in a nutshell, is how I found myself following in the footsteps of Jacob Wortman. Like Wortman, I began searching for fossils in central Wyoming’s Wind River Basin at an early age. I spent my first field season in the Wind River Basin in the summer of 1990, exactly 110 years after Wortman first explored the region as an employee of Edward Drinker Cope. I was still in my twenties that summer—only a few years older than Wortman had been—and I was the proud holder of a freshly minted Ph.D. I even worked for the same museum that employed Wortman for a short, turbulent, but highly successful stint searching for Jurassic dinosaurs not too far to the southeast, at a place called Sheep Creek. Beyond these basic parallels, my experiences in the Wind River Basin bear little resemblance to what Wortman must have endured there. Over the intervening century, science, society, and the American West have all changed dramatically. Technological advances allow us to enjoy a standard of living in the field that Wortman would find shocking, if not downTHE BIRTH OF A GHOST LINEAGE 143 right decadent...