Whistler’s Mission : Scientist Shows That Paleontology Is Something the Masses Can Dig

David Whistler is the point where science meets the rest of the world.

The Van Nuys paleontologist came of age in an era when science was the national mission, when bright, young researchers could count on good jobs and government funds were abundant.

Now, he plugs on at a time when schoolkids can’t point out Antarctica on a map, when, as he puts it, “it’s embarrassing how poorly versed in science Americans are” and budget cuts have left his colleagues’ careers in tatters.

He himself was out of work for a year and a half recently. He believes it was the result of his outspoken protests over funding cuts to his program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park. Though reinstated, he is sadder now and somewhat embittered.

“I don’t know what our national purpose is today,” he said. “Survival, I guess.”

Which is partly why several times a year, Whistler takes curious amateurs on field trips to the desert. Unlike many research scientists, whose work keeps them removed from the untutored masses, Whistler throws himself among them. He is anxious not just to impart knowledge but, like someone whose beliefs are under siege, to make his pupils see that science is fun.

“Everything has not been discovered already,” he said as he scrambled up a slope of loose gravel on a recent expedition. “Do everyone a favor and tell them that.”

This particular camping trip, sponsored by the museum, where Whistler is a curator, drew more than 50 people including a violinist, an accountant and several children, some as young as 3.

Participants set up their own tents and paid the museum fees of up to $260 for a family of three to cover food and educational programs. Whistler, who is planning another trip this weekend, always brings his wife, Helen, to oversee the massive task of cooking.

Sharing science face-to-face with everyone from conservative Christians who consider scientists devils to inner-city kids who have never seen the desert is Whistler’s way of striking back, of whittling away at the pervasive apathy that he says keeps people glued to their TV sets and indifferent to intellectual exploration.

“He’s not the sort of person to stay cloistered in an office,” said Bruce Lander, a paleontologist for an Altadena firm that briefly employed Whistler. “Unlike a lot of scientists . . . he can get people enthused.”

Trails of Bones

The 55-year-old Whistler explains how to look for fossils by following trails of bones. “Be fascinated,” he instructs his weekend charges. But don’t scare the tortoises, he adds. They’ll urinate from fright and die for lack of water.

The group scatters. Beneath their feet, a carpet of identical, buff-colored bits turns out to be peppered with fossilized bone fragments.

At first, telling bones from rocks from root castings--fossilized roots of ancient plants--befuddles everyone. Bone is distinct because of its shape and texture, Whistler instructs a boy who looks lost. “There’s one underneath your left foot,” he adds.

Children follow Whistler like the Pied Piper, querying him about their finds. “That’s a root casting,” Whistler tells one child. “That’s a rock,” he tells another. “Hello, Miocene!” he exclaims to a third, and mutters to himself: “That’s pretty stuff, that’s a nice piece of bone. But what I want is a nice horse tooth.”

A boy hollers triumphantly from the top of a nearby hill, waving something in the air. “From here,” Whistler calls back, “it looks like somebody’s spare rib.”

Except for that picnic leftover--borne like a trophy for the rest of the trip--the day’s finds, including handfuls of pink bone chips and an ancient Coke bottle, are turned over to the state park. Whistler holds the only permit to collect fossils from Red Rock Canyon State Park, the focus of his studies for well over 30 years.

Located north of the town of Mojave in Kern County, Red Rock Canyon is a stretch of eroded red cliffs and badlands, part of what geologists call the Dove Springs Formation.

This is the remnant of an ancient flood plain, miles deep with the remains of animals more than 7 million years old. At Red Rock, the sediments have been thrust to the surface by seismic forces and worn down by wind and water, exposing a rich stew of species beneath.

Whistler has spent most of his career in and out of Red Rock Canyon. It was the place he collected his first fossil as a geology student at UC Riverside, and later, the subject of his doctoral thesis at UC Berkeley.

He’s dug thousands of Miocene fossils out of these dry hills. A dozen previously unknown species have been found there--the extinct bear-dog, for instance.

On this trip, between fossil hunting, meals and campfires, Whistler dispenses a steady stream of Latin names and esoterica. Not merely a bird, but a white-crowned sparrow, woke campers in the morning. Stippled ridges in the distance indicate faults and foretell cataclysms to come. A patch of dark rock is an ancient lava flow. Coyote scat yields the ankle of a kangaroo rat--a sign the coyotes are prospering.

Freda and Henry Vizcarra of Sherman Oaks brought Reid, their 3 1/2-year-old son, mainly because “he likes dirt,” Freda said. But they soon found themselves sucked into Whistler’s monologues.

“It’s really intriguing,” Henry said. “You could get someone really dry for something like this, but [Whistler] isn’t.”

Even if most of the group never thinks of paleontology again, they won’t forget their brush with science, Whistler said. “All you can do is expose them.”

Back in Los Angeles, Whistler’s large museum office, in institutional beige, is lined with books and metal cabinets. Outside in the hall, the cabinets reach to the ceiling. They are full of fossils, tens of thousands of which were collected by Whistler himself.

There is the skull of a wolfish dog with alarming fangs and thousands of tiny mouse teeth like bread crumbs, arranged on heads of pins. There is a baseball-sized elephant molar and lizard bones smaller than the eye of a needle.

In all, the museum’s collection has about 180,000 specimens numbered, identified and recorded. Many thousands more sit uncataloged in warehouses.

Whistler remarks often on their beauty. But aside from their aesthetic appeal, the fossils are invaluable as markers of time, he says.

Scarce Clues

Geologists use them to cross-check the age of deposits, matching them against the results of other methods. Fast-evolving species like mice can help pin down the age of rocks to within 250,000 years--a trick of considerable value to such worldly pursuits as oil exploration.

But Whistler and other paleontologists also prize their minutiae as scarce clues to the Earth’s history. This flotsam washed up from lost times are the basis of a “big, diverse, beautiful story unfolding--one species at a time,” Whistler says.

Often, though, such timeless questions are quickly eclipsed by the petty financial concerns of the present, as Whistler painfully discovered.

For years, he and his colleagues have been fighting for the preservation of their department, Whistler said. He claims this led to a dispute with former museum director Craig Black in January 1993, immediately after which he was laid off in violation of civil service rules, according to the L.A. County Civil Service Commission.

He was reinstated the following July--only to be laid off again a month later, ostensibly because of a massive cutback in museum funding that cost scores of his colleagues their jobs.

The commission reinstated Whistler again in August 1994, this time ruling unequivocally that Black had dismissed him out of retaliation.

More Problems

Whistler’s travails were only a part of the misery engulfing the museum in those years. Black retired in 1993, his tenure tainted by allegations of questionable management, including charges that he used county personnel to renovate his home. He denies any wrongdoing.

Capping it all last year, Marcus Arthur Rodriguez, the museum’s former chief deputy director, was sentenced to seven years in prison for embezzling from the museum and its private foundation.

Reached at his home in New Mexico, Black declined to comment on Whistler’s reinstatement. But he suggested the two scientists had differences on the aims of paleontology. A vertebrate paleontologist himself, Black says the discipline must find new ways to prove its worth. “We have spent well over 125 years cataloging and describing. A lot of that information can be put to other uses now.”

Today, Whistler still feels jaundiced. Although he praises the museum’s current administration as ethical, he bemoans the new era in which “an inordinate amount of energy is spent on simple survival and curators are reduced to being fund-raisers.”

But one thing that he says hasn’t changed for him is the fascination. Not once, in well over 30 years of scratching through rocks and dirt, has he gotten bored with fossils.

Science, Whistler says, “is a whole way of looking at life. It can’t solve all problems, but it enforces intellectual discipline. And we have become very intellectually undisciplined.”