Dig It! : For dinosaur maniacs, helping paleontologists uncover bones in northwest Montana’s ‘Jurassic’ graveyard is a dream trip.

With dinosaur mania rampaging like a ravenous Tyrannosaurus rex through the land, and children from 6 to 60 counting down the days until the June 11 opening of Steven Spielberg’s hotly anticipated new movie, “Jurassic Park,” let me make one thing clear:

I was into dinosaurs before they became trendy.

Not that people haven’t always been intrigued by these enigmatic beasts, and not that Michael Crichton’s lively novel-cum-movie about bioengineered dinosaurs running amok in a theme park didn’t juice up my interest.

But dinosaurs have long held a singular fascination for me. As a tyke, I once spent hours retracing my steps home from school--through a graveyard, no less--trying in vain to locate the misplaced gray plastic Allosaurus that was my constant talisman.

So when I spotted the notice for a dinosaur dig workshop in Montana in my Nature Conservancy magazine last spring, a sense of exhilaration swept through me. Here was a chance to stay at a Western ranch, see a new part of the country, uncover 80-million-year-old bones that had never been seen by another human being and contribute money and labor to a worthwhile research endeavor.

What could be more fun--even if it meant spending days on my knees on the hard, dusty ground in who-knew-what conditions?

I can dig it, I thought. “Sign me up,” I told Ralph Waldt, the naturalist at the conservancy’s Pine Butte Preserve and Guest Ranch in northwest Montana. I got the last of 16 spots.

Waldt explained that a good chunk ($425) of the week’s $1,150 tab qualified as a tax-deductible donation that would go directly to the preserve. The rest would cover three meals a day; my own rustic cabin, complete with stone fireplace (which came in mighty handy on those brisk Montana evenings), and a week’s worth of instruction from him and a visiting paleobotanist. Air fare was extra, of course.

All I had to do was wait until September.

In the meantime, I boned up on dinosaurs by reading “Digging Dinosaurs” (Harper & Row, $8.95) by John R. (Jack) Horner, a paleontologist whose pioneering research in Montana in the last 15 years has given rise to several new theories--among them that dinosaurs traveled in large herds and, like birds, nurtured their young in nests.

It thrilled me to know that we would be scouting the same turf where Horner, now curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., had found the remains of thousands of duck-billed dinosaurs and, 15 years ago, the first nest of baby dinosaurs ever found. Horner dubbed the species Maiasaura , Greek for “good mother lizard.”

When the time finally came, I flew from San Francisco via Denver to Great Falls, Mont., named for the Missouri River falls observed by explorers Lewis and Clark in 1805. The next morning, I waited in the lobby of the Best Western for the van that would take me to the ranch.

A fair-haired, lanky cowboy in black jeans, buffalo-plaid shirt, silver belt buckle, vest and trail-worn boots sauntered in, looking like the genuine article. Indeed, he was Lee Barhaugh, who with his wife, Genny, manages the guest ranch.

As we picked up other diggers on the motel circuit, I was happy to see that our group was diversified age-wise, with quite a few people in their 20s, 30s and 40s--and as citified as I. I reckoned we could produce a perfect sequel to the Billy Crystal film about yuppies finding themselves on a cattle drive: “City Slickers Go Fossil Hunting.”

As we headed northwest through prairieland, Barhaugh kept up a running commentary, pointing out Square Butte, a favorite subject of Western artist Charles M. Russell; an occasional white-tailed or mule deer, and a common feature he called the “Montana ranchette--20 acres, a house, a couple of horses and a satellite dish, the state flower of Montana.”

In the town of Choteau (pronounced SHOW-toe), Barhaugh picked up provisions. He offered a refund to anybody who lost weight during the week. (Nobody got a nickel; we ate three squares a day, including a delightful sack lunch, and the ranch kitchen’s specialties were non-slimming breads and desserts.)

Twenty-seven miles west of Choteau, two hours south of Glacier National Park, five miles east of the Bob Marshall Wilderness and just past a missile silo or two, the Pine Butte Preserve and Guest Ranch butt up against the edge of the rugged Eastern Front of the Rocky Mountains. The preserve and guest ranch are owned by the Nature Conservancy, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to buying and preserving land that is home to rare plants and animals.

It is an immense land of magnificent beauty, splashed last mid-September with a fall palette of yellows, rusts, browns and greens that contrasted with the snow-covered peaks, all topped by the famous Montana big sky with its billowy white and gray clouds.

Named for a butte that dominates the landscape, the preserve covers 18,000 acres of fen, or wetland, and prairie habitats with more than 100 species of birds, 650 species of plants and 40 species of mammals, including grizzly bears.

Pine Butte has perhaps the country’s highest concentration of grizzlies per acre. The bears are the preserve’s main reason for being, but unfortunately they eluded our eager eyes that week.

They were about the only thing that did, though. The preserve lacks only buffalo for a full complement of native mammals. By week’s end, we had seen coyotes, pronghorn antelopes (the second-fastest animal in the world after the cheetah), a badger, golden eagles, herds of elk (recovering in numbers after being nearly absent for 60 years), deer, marsh hawks, velvety-looking harvester ants building their large hills, and a tiny, seldom-seen chorus frog that Ralph Waldt put into his weathered Stetson to photograph.

(It was tough to imagine out there on the prairie, but Waldt, a bearish, slow-talking, blond man who favors plaid flannel shirts, is a concert violinist who once played a Stradivarius. He also takes exquisite nature photographs.)

One square mile of the territory--tacked on to the property in the 1980s--was added to preserve the rich dinosaur bone bed that paleontologist Horner and his proteges have long “mined” in forbidding badlands that were once part of a ranch owned here by the Peebles family. On geological maps, the area is described as the Willow Creek anticline (a fancy name for a small hill, in this case one that has been largely eroded).

The Pine Butte Guest Ranch has a traditional Western feel. The hospitable staff carried our bags on carts to our cabins, made of native stone and wood and nestled amid aspen and cottonwood trees. A towering wood pile on each porch provided the fuel for warming nightly fires. In most cases, participants traveling in pairs bunked together in their cozy cabins. But I had my own, next to the south fork of the Teton River, with two single beds, a small bathroom, a closet, a chest of drawers and a sort of motley, cowboy-style decor.

Each morning, we moseyed over to the main ranch house, where we sat family-style around long tables for breakfast. It consisted of such hearty fare as pancakes, bacon and eggs and--a favorite of our group--Cream of the West, a hot cereal made in Montana. (Great stuff. I ordered a case to give as Christmas gifts.)

Our days were jam-packed with outings, but each evening we’d gather for a social hour and lively discussions over hors d’oeuvres and glasses of wine and soft drinks. As it happened, most of us were there because of an enduring love of dinosaurs that began in childhood. One man quipped that he wanted to be able to catch up with his kids’ knowledge.

The three- or four-course dinners--prepared by the ranch’s friendly, female kitchen staff--were worthy of their own cookbook. Throughout the week, we had salads, vegetables, pasta, lasagna, chicken and steak. And those desserts! Peach cobbler with whipped cream, banana cake, puff pastries with ice cream. We joked that, by week’s end, our arteries just might be as hard as the bones we were digging.

Ever since British anatomist Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur --from the ancient Greek deinos , meaning “terrible,” and sauros , meaning “lizard”--the beasts and their fossilized remnants have been a global rage.

Dead for 65 million years, these critters are still grabbing front-page headlines and commercial attention--from the hoopla over Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” and the purple Barney of TV kid-show fame, to Maya Angelou’s poem at President Clinton’s inauguration, not to mention a plethora of theme parks, lunch pails, puzzles, sheets, towels, holograms and T-shirts.

Recent stories in National Geographic, Time and newspapers have debated the merits of discoveries and what they prove or disprove--and whether bones should be sold for profit or used for research. Each night after supper and a lecture, as we sat in the knotty-pine-paneled main lodge, we puzzled over burning questions:

Are birds really the modern descendants of T. rex, the toothy carnivore?

Were dinosaurs warm- or cold-blooded? Smart or dumb? Violent or placid? Were they rendered extinct en masse by the dust cloud produced by a gigantic meteor that crashed to Earth, or, as a popular Far Side cartoon would have us believe, did they perhaps smoke themselves to death? (“The real reason dinosaurs became extinct,” reads the caption under the drawing of three dinosaurs with cigarettes hanging from their mouths.)

Our first morning, we rose to a light dusting of snow (better this than the foot that had been dumped on the area just the month before, in August). We headed in vans to the bone bed, where half a dozen tepee skeletons marked the campsite where Horner’s crews work each summer.

Karen Chin, a paleobotanist who has worked for Horner for several years, gave us some quick instruction on how to dig without destroying the bones. Make tiny jabs at the dirt with an ice pick or awl, then carefully sweep the loosened dirt into a dust pan and toss it into a bucket. Be sure to keep your working space level.

It seemed easy enough, but my dig partner--Michael, a New York lawyer--decided on a different technique, more like Sharon Stone’s frenzied stabbing in the film “Basic Instinct.” After his overzealous gouging chopped apart a piece of bone that we then mistakenly dumped into the park- ing area, he said: “OK, we’ll do it your way.” But he never really did.

(Don’t fret that we novices were allowed to destroy valuable specimens willy-nilly. For many years, bones have been dug from this bed by professionals and thoroughly analyzed. Otherwise, you can bet that we would not have been allowed anywhere near it.)

We all hit pay dirt, more or less, as we uncovered several specimens of dark gray or reddish fossilized bones. Few of them were “articulated,” or connected at joints. Rather, the bones were in a huge jumble. One theory is that the herd was wiped out by a volcanic eruption, the meat cooked off by heat and the bones transported by a mudslide.

The bone bed, one of the world’s richest, is 2 1/2 miles long and half a mile wide. In addition to the duck-billed maiasaurs, other species have been discovered here, including flying pterosaurs and two predators, Troodon and Albertosaurus.

When it comes to searching for fossils, no land is better than badlands. Very little other than scrub grass grows in this stark, desolate terrain--covered in prehistoric times by an inland seaway and coastal plains--where entire hilltops have been eroded into valleys by water and wind.

The wind, by the way, often blows at more than 100 miles an hour and can rip doors off pickup trucks. We got a taste of it one day when bandanna masks were called for, even though the breeze got up to only 35 m.p.h.

Spring is the best time to prospect for bones, after the forces of nature have done much of the excavating and new specimens literally jut from freshly washed slopes and gullies. However, most amateur digs take place in summer and fall.

Rain caused a few interruptions throughout the week. Each time it started to shower, we had to cover our dig area with a big plastic tarp and weight it with stones to keep it from flapping away. When wet, the bone bed becomes an undiggable muck.

Michael and I ended up with fragments that didn’t amount to much, but right next to us a team excavated a femur that we eventually put in a plaster cast for shipment to the Museum of the Rockies for study. The average adult maiasaur, which lived about 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, was 25 to 30 feet from nose to tail, medium size by dinosaur standards. These herd-oriented good mother lizards have come to be called, somewhat irreverently, the cattle of the Cretaceous.

As addicted as most of us quickly became to digging and prospecting for bones, we also enjoyed a mid-week excursion to the top of Pine Butte, where we saw evidence of marine fossils from an ancient sea and a limber pine savannah, hundreds of years old but stunted by the fierce winds. We also visited Lewis and Clark National Forest, where we scrambled up rocky hillsides to forage with rock hammers for Paleozoic Era fossils of primitive marine life.

Thursday dawned sunny after an overnight rain. Waldt called it “bikini weather,” but we donned our long johns and dodged snow flurries. We spent hours in the brisk wind looking for bone fragments in eroded gullies. We found plenty.

We also came upon a pile of smoothly polished stones that had no business being there. Waldt theorized that they were gastroliths, swallowed by dinosaurs to aid in digestion and buffed to a sleek finish in the critters’ innards.

Long about now, some of you are probably wondering just what was so special about getting up early to go dig in the dirt in less-than-pleasant weather in what some might view as a Godforsaken part of the country. True, it’s not for everybody.

But to me and to most of my companions, it was a heavenly adventure. Montana has some of the most beautiful landscape around. And few experiences top seeing abundant wildlife actually in the wild--unless it’s digging up the bones of extinct beasts never seen by a single soul. Uncovering that first bit of gray rib--no matter how insignificant it might have been in the grand scientific scheme of things--was a thrill I’ll never forget.

And staying at the Pine Butte Guest Ranch is hardly roughing it. We’re talking maid service, toasty fireplace and yummy chow. There’s even a hair-dryer plug.

Friday was a big day. We were at last heading to Egg Mountain, the famous (in paleontological circles, anyhow) mound where Horner and his compatriots found several clutches of fossilized eggs laid in exacting, spiral patterns. Karen Chin taught us to put our backs to the sun and spot dark specks in our shadows. Those were the eggshell fragments, lying in abundance everywhere we turned. We also used rock hammers to break apart the mudstone that made up the hill. At one point, I found not only some bone chips but also what appeared to be a dinosaur tooth.

For Chin, who lives in Half Moon Bay, Calif., this was old hat. She has worked intermittently with Horner since 1984. Recently, she was interviewed by the British producers of a TV documentary about the science behind “Jurassic Park” because her research work is similar to that of Laura Dern’s movie character. Chin’s photograph appeared in National Geographic’s January dinosaur issue.

A former naturalist with the U.S. Park Service, she is now working on her Ph.D. in geology/paleontology, specializing in coprolites, or fossilized dung.

“I take a lot of abuse for this research topic,” she told us.

That last night, we recapped the week as we sat around the lodge, with its antler-armed chairs and bear skin wall hangings. (One was an old mama bear that Lee Barhaugh shot after the bear ventured into the kitchen once too often.)

On Saturday, our congenial group--the lawyer, the social worker, the fabric salesman, the carpenter, the banker, the retired couple, the direct-mail advertisers, the newspaper reporter, the newspaper advertising executive and newspaper controller, the instrumentation technician, the biotech company executives, the state park official--headed back with great reluctance to real life, carrying an occasional bone fragment, a few gastroliths, tiny bits of eggshell and a world of memories from the Montana badlands.

Most of us agreed that it was the best vacation ever. I’m already planning my next visit.

GUIDEBOOK

Bones to Pick

Getting there: From LAX, you can fly to Great Falls, Mont., on Delta (transfer in Salt Lake City) or Alaska (Spokane), $380 round-trip, 14-day advance; or on United (Denver), $395 round-trip, 14-day advance. (All flights require a change of planes.) Dinosaur dig workshop participants will be picked up by van free of charge in Great Falls, or may drive themselves following directions supplied by the preserve.

Pine Butte Swamp Preserve: The preserve’s dinosaur dig workshop is Sept. 11-17 this year; cost is $1,175 (of which $425 is a tax-deductible donation). The preserve also offers sessions on grizzly bears, nature photography, mammal tracking and other topics. For more information on any of the above, contact Ralph Waldt, Naturalist, HC 58 Box 27, Choteau, Mont. 59422, (406) 466-2621.

For more information on guest ranch reservations only, contact Lee and Genny Barhaugh, Managers, Pine Butte Guest Ranch, HC 58 Box 34C, Choteau, Mont. 59422, (406) 466-2158. The 10 cabins are booked through this summer.

Where else to dig for dinosaurs:

The organizations below are among others that sponsor digs for amateurs:

Earthwatch, a nonprofit group based near Boston, offers three 10-person summer digs in Glasgow, Mont., which are fully booked for this summer but are expected to be offered again next year. Cost: $1,295 (much or all possibly tax-deductible), not including transportation costs (also theoretically tax-deductible). Participants share cooking and bunking in a four-bedroom house on Montana’s high plains. Earthwatch is also in the process of organizing 1994 dinosaur digs in China, Utah and elsewhere. For more information, call (800) 776-0188.

Dinamation International Society offers several digs in western Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, May-September, some led by Robert Bakker, well-known paleontologist and author of “The Dinosaur Heresies.” Cost: $525 (children’s rate) up to $850, not including air transportation. For information: Mike Perry or Rick Adleman, Dinamation International Society, 145-A N. Mesa St., P.O. Box 307, Fruita, Colo. 81521, or Vina Villa- nueva, Dinamation International Corp., 189-A Technology Drive, Irvine 92718, (800) DIG-DINO.

Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University, offers weeklong sessions each summer at the Pine Butte Swamp Preserve dig site near Choteau, Mont. Participants stay in tepees. Cost: $650-$850, not including air transportation. Contact: Education Department, Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University, Bozeman, Mont. 59715, (406) 994-2251.

For more information: Call or write Travel Montana, 1424 9th Ave., Helena, Mont. 59620, (800) 541-1447.