ASU Research E-Magazine: Fossil Fish & Dinosaur Eggs

John Babiarz’s customers know him as the owner of Greenfield Citrus Nursery in Mesa. Most have no idea that he is an accomplished fossil hunter and amateur vertebrate paleontologist.

The 11-foot-long bulldog fish that died in the seas flowing across South Dakota about 70 million years ago apparently didn’t starve to death. The bulldog fish still has several small pieces of backbone from its last meal sticking through its ribs. The complete specimen, one of only 20 like it in the world, is prominent among the fossil treasures on display in Arizona State University’s Geology Museum.

The bulldog fish is on loan from amateur paleontologist John Babiarz. As owner of Greenfield Citrus Nursery in Mesa, Babiarz sells thousands of citrus and palm trees a year. As president of the non-profit Babiarz Institute of Paleontological Studies Inc. (BIOPSI), he promotes paleontological education and research through ASU’s Geology Museum.

“He’s more knowledgeable on the subject of vertebrate paleontology than most people I know,” says museum Curator Brad Archer. “He’s a great preparator. He’s better than I am and I thought I was pretty good.”

Like Archer, ASU geology Professor Emeritus Robert S. Dietz is a BIOPSI advisory board member. As co-donor of several spectacular fossil and mineralogical specimens to the museum, Dietz sees in Babiarz a kindred spirit.

“John Babiarz has been very generous with us here. He’s a wonderful amateur paleontologist,” Dietz says.

Like most universities, ASU has no paleontology degree program. The popularity of last summer’s blockbuster film Jurassic Park notwithstanding, there is precious little funding available for paleontological education or research in the United States.

But through BIOPSI, Babiarz is fueling a new enthusiasm for fossils at ASU. His bulldog fish skeleton, dinosaur bones, and sharks’ teeth displayed at the museum are its most visible examples.

“There’s no way we can collect specimens like that and prepare them,” Archer says. “It would be way too costly.”

Babiarz founded BIOPSI in June 1991, partly out of frustration over the lack of a natural history museum in the Phoenix area, and partly to promote cooperation between private collectors and the academic community.

He also wanted to share the best of his extensive fossil collection with others. So he took the Triceratops by the horns and started yanking. “An unusual fossil like the fish draws a lot of kids to come look at it,” Babiarz says. “That’s what it’s all about, getting the kids interested.”

Since the BIOPSI start-up, ASU coincidentally began to jointly organize a new natural history museum with the Valley Forward Association and the cities of Tempe, Scottsdale, and Phoenix. Called the Southwest Center for Education and the Natural Environment (SCENE), it has a modest collection drawn from several ASU departments. The exhibits are temporarily on display at the ASU Visitor Center, located at the corner of Rural Road and Apache Boulevard in Tempe.

The SCENE effort includes the ASU Geology Department and Museum but is much broader than rocks and fossils. SCENE has come up for discussion at several BIOPSI meetings. Babiarz is following its development with interest.

“It would be a good idea to get a museum going. I’m sure it’s going to be expensive, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” Babiarz says.

Fueling Scholarly Interests
Over the past year, Babiarz has brought a series of paleontologists from around the country to speak at ASU in connection with the Geology Department. The most recent was dinosaur expert Edwin H. Colbert, curator emeritus of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, now of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff.

“When I was a young squirt, dinosaurs were sort of gee-whiz things for the paleontological community,” Colbert said during his visit. “They were there to impress the public, but serious paleontologists didn’t think much, didn’t do much work on them.”

Researchers’ attitudes have changed toward dinosaurs over the past two decades, according to Colbert.

“There’s a tremendous amount of research being done on them now, and paleontologists realize there’s a lot to be found out about the dinosaurs,” he says.

Dinosaurs or sea cows, mammoths or turtles, it hardly matters to Babiarz. He doesn’t discriminate when it comes to fossils of backboned animals. He loves them all.

Babiarz has donated his time generously to the ASU Geology Museum to promote them, too, even though as proprietor of a 30-acre tree farm, he has precious little to spare. For example, he conceived and spearheaded the preparation of the museum’s giant fossil shark jaws, which have been on display since the fall of 1993.

Curator Brad Archer has collaborated closely with Babiarz on research projects as well as exhibits. They were coauthors of a 1992 article, published in the Journal of Paleontology, which described the remains of a dinosaur found in northwest New Mexico.

The dinosaur belongs to the Tyrannosaur family. A New Mexico rock dealer told Babiarz of the find, who then brought it to Archer’s attention.

Archer and Babiarz believe the remains are the most complete known from the upper Cretaceous Kirkland Shale of northwestern New Mexico. The remains include pieces of skull, forelimbs, ribs, tailbones, and a complete, 6-foot-long hind leg.

“It had the claws on it and everything,” Archer says. “It’s a lesser-known dinosaur.”

Babiarz also brought in a 2-million-year-old fossil bird egg from a site in eastern Arizona near Duncan. The cracked egg measures 4 inches long. Archer and Babiarz examined a cross-section of the egg under a scanning electron microscope. They tentatively identified the egg as condor, an opinion echoed by University of Colorado fossil-egg specialist Karl Hirsch.

This cracked egg is 2-million-years old and comes from a site in eastern Arizona. The egg measures 4 inches long and has been tentatively identified as a condor egg.

In one of their first joint projects, Babiarz and Archer excavated the remains of a horse, possibly 10,000 years old, in southwest Phoenix in late 1991. They were assisted by Ron Stebler, owner of Phoenix Fossils Inc.

The horse was discovered by employees of Browning-Ferris Industries who were digging up an old fuel tank. Archer and Babiarz now are hoping to obtain an accurate radiocarbon date to confirm its exact age.

“A date of more than 8,000 years would mean that this is the most complete fossil horse of this time period ever found in Arizona, and possibly the Southwest,” Archer says.

The crew recovered the skull, some leg and rib bones, and part of a shoulder blade in good condition.

“The fossil never would have been collected in the condition that it was without the help and experience of both John Babiarz and Ron Stebler,” Archer notes.

Babiarz and Archer excavated the remains of this horse which is possibly 10,000 years old in southwest Phoenix.

Intriguing Eggs
Babiarz and Stebler also helped Archer to surmise intriguing ideas from a cluster of dinosaur eggs ASU acquired in 1993.

The eggs, found in central China, reportedly come from rocks of the late Cretaceous Period—the last age of the dinosaurs that ended about 65 million years ago. Discovered by farmers, the site’s location has been kept secret and has not been visited by scientists.

Just one of the smooth, spherical eggs is large enough to fill a child’s Easter basket, but what species they come from is unknown.

Brad Archer displays 135-million year-old dinosaur eggs from China, among the largest ever found.

“I can tell you they’re fossil reptile eggs, which means if they’re the right age—66 million to 248 million years old—they have to be dinosaur eggs,” Archer says. “But nobody can confirm the age. Just looking at them, I can’t imagine anything else they could possibly be.”

Archer again consulted the University of Colorado’s Karl Hirsch, who agrees. Hirsch had examined other eggs from the same site brought back by a Colorado rock dealer.

Hirsch looked at a cross-section of the eggs under a microscope. Their structure resembled other dinosaur eggs he has seen and also eggs laid by modern flightless birds such as the ostrich, the moa, and the emu. Interesting information, Archer notes, because some scientists consider modern birds to be the dinosaurs’ direct descendants.

The first egg the museum acquired was donated by Wayne Thompson, a local mineral dealer and former ASU geology student. The museum then bought a group of four more, still fixed in a matrix of siltstone, with financial support from Robert Dietz and the ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

But it was the nine-egg cluster that Thompson allowed Archer, Babiarz, and Stebler to make a cast for the museum that really got them thinking.

First, they observed that the eggs seem to be arranged in arcs, as if they were part of a large circle. They extrapolated that there may have been as many as 100 eggs in the nest.

Furthermore, the bottom of the eggs were unbroken, but most of the tops were missing. This suggests that the eggs were hatched and that the animals crawled out of the nest on their own, leaving the eggs relatively undisturbed. This is the way sea turtles lay their eggs, Archer explains.

“They lay a large number of eggs. The more eggs a reptile or any animal lays, the less likely there is to be any care of them by the parent because the survival rate is greater,” he says.

This is in contrast to Maiasaurus eggs discovered in Montana by Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies. Most of the eggs he found were smashed and cracked. Horner’s theory: the baby maiasaurs crushed the eggs as they were cared for in the nests.

Archer also noticed that there were two different kinds of eggs in one nest. Some are smaller than most of the others. But the small ones looked out of place, because the others are evenly laid in neat, consistent spacing.

“Every once in awhile you’d see this little egg that was up a little bit higher and right in the middle of a space where it didn’t belong,” Archer says. “How do you explain a small, intact egg like that sitting right in the middle of this other dinosaur’s nest?”

Archer, Stebler and Babiarz have some ideas about that, too.

“Some modern birds will lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and let them hatch with the other ones,” Archer says. “That, again, would tend to support the fact that the parent dinosaur laid this big nest of eggs and then just took off and left it unguarded. “That’s purely speculation, but you wonder how it got there, because it definitely is a different type,” he adds.

Evolving Collaboration
Babiarz’s interest in ASU’s Geology Museum followed a 1989 article in the Arizona Republic about Archer’s graduate research on fossil tortoises. Archer then served as student curator.

“When I met Brad, one of the first things I said was, ‘Hey, I’ve got a nice fish that needs a home. I want to get it out of my living room,’” Babiarz recalls.

Babiarz began collecting fossils as a college student in Florida in the mid-1960s. He collected sharks’ teeth off the beaches. He majored in botany at the University of Miami, but dropped out after nearly three years.

“I felt like I was spinning my wheels and wasn’t learning much,” Babiarz says. Coming from a high-school class of 90, he found it difficult adjusting to the 10,000-plus students on the Miami campus. “It was overwhelming.”

Babiarz moved to the Phoenix area in 1969 and spent the next five years working for a hotel. Three years later he began selling citrus trees from street corners on weekends. In 1980, he leased 50 acres in Mesa and started a farm to grow his own trees.

Meanwhile, he continued his education. “I’ve spent about eight years in college. I would just take classes I needed to get ahead in the business,” he says.

The hotel wanted to ship him to Los Angeles. Not wanting to go, Babiarz quit, focusing his energy on the farm. He now owns 30 acres of his own prime soil in historic Lehi Valley.

Despite his hectic, seven-day-a-week work schedule, Babiarz makes annual pilgrimages each summer to collect fossils in South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and elsewhere. He has amassed a large collection.

The floor-to-ceiling shelves and cupboards of his office are tightly packed with the bones of extinct creatures: three-toed horses, saber-toothed cats, pigs that stood six feet tall at the shoulder. Most of the fossils Babiarz painstakingly and lovingly reassembled and prepared for display himself. “Some of the biggest and best stuff is still unprepared,” he says.

It is illegal to collect vertebrate fossils on federal land without a permit, which typically is issued only to research or educational institutions. Babiarz does his collecting on private land owned by friends. He also collects in South Carolina and Florida, which have progressive laws governing collecting on state lands.

Both states issue hobby permits that allow individuals to collect fossils anywhere on state land for a nominal fee. Collectors are required to report anything significant. Most fossils found technically belong to the states, but the provision is rarely enforced, and sharks’ teeth need not be reported.

If you want to get Babiarz riled, just ask him about legislation introduced last year by Montana Sen. Max Baucus that would greatly restrict fossil collection for recreational or commercial purposes.

“With the Baucus Bill, you get thrown in jail for 1 year and a $10,000 fine for carrying a coprolite, a fossil turd, off federal land,” he says. Babiarz claims he has never sold a fossil, although he has traded some. But make no mistake, he is a diehard capitalist.

“I don’t see anything wrong in selling fossils at all. It makes the economy go around.”

Babiarz maintains that the less restrictive Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 1993, proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, makes more sense than the Baucus Bill.

“Let’s face it, most fossils are found by amateurs,” he says.

Although ASU’s Geology Museum has a fruitful working relationship with local fossil collectors and dealers, some professional paleontologists frown upon them. Critics complain, and Babiarz admits with some merit, that scientific information was lost when the fossil eggs from China were improperly removed and sold.

But Archer points out that the eggs may never have come to the attention of scientists without the involvement of rock dealers. “I can’t imagine any museum in the United States that could afford to mount an expedition over to China to collect them,” he says.

He regards responsible amateur paleontologists like Babiarz, and responsible dealers like Stebler, with a similar attitude.

“If it weren’t for them there would be many specimens that would never be found.” —Steve Koppes