He Knows Where the Bodies Are Buried

People are too dinocentric," says paleobiologist Donald Prothero. "The really interesting stuff goes on with mammals." He should know. After decades of work, the Occidental College professor emeritus has produced The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals, a definitive tour of a lost world of bear-sized beavers, saber-toothed cats, and a stunning menagerie of marsupials. He's also a committed debunker, publishing widely about the truth of evolution and the lie of the Bigfoot cult. Next up: A book exposing UFO beliefs.

IN THE FIELD Prothero at a site near Kremmling, Colorado. “There are 550 million years of prehistoric animals to study,” he says, “and the dinosaurs occupied only a quarter of that.”Photo courtesy of T. Levelle

So-called cryptozoologists have devoted themselves to the study of cryptids like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. Where do their beliefs come from?

There's a quasi-religious aspect. Belief in cryptids helps them feel connected to something that science can't explain. They feel cut off from nature, and they feel that science has demystified their world and left it with no monsters.

Why is that a problem?

Until the beginning of the 20th century, everybody believed in monsters. Enormous monsters and scary beasts are part of every cultural tradition. It's unknown in human history to have a culture that doesn't believe in such creatures. We are the exception. Our ancestors certainly had to deal with creatures that would kill them and eat them. So there's probably an argument that it's deeply ingrained in our psyche to have some kind of monster in our lives.

The creatures in your field guide, like the bear-sized hyena, Dinocrocuta; the unicorn pig, Kubanochoerus; or the huge one-horned rhino, Elasmotherium, are so fascinating and strange that one wonders why we need to imagine cryptids.

The real animals are more interesting, but what cryptozoology is really about is finding a creature that's actually still alive, that's eluded science and eluded everybody except these privileged few out there hunting the Sasquatch. That's what drives them.

But the evidence is so weak.

Yes, and that applies to UFOs as well. We all walk around now with a video camera in our pocket, and yet the quality of the evidence has gotten worse, not better. Were these things really out there, people would be seeing more of them and there would be better photographs and better evidence, but in fact the opposite is true.

What got you interested in prehistoric life?

I knew I was going to be a paleontologist as soon as I knew what the word meant. I was one of those kids who got hooked on dinosaurs at age 4 and never grew up. But then I learned as an undergrad that the research choices for dinosaurs are very limited: There are too many people in the field and not enough new stuff to work on. With mammals, there's no limit to what you can do.

What's been some of your primary work in the field?

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, the American Museum of Natural History in New York had received a collection of more than 200,000 mammal fossils that had mostly never been studied. I found a whole floor of fossil rhinoceroses from North America, 90 percent of which no one had looked at before, except maybe one person. So I sat down to work on them, and over more than 25 years I completely documented everything there was to know about fossil rhinoceroses. They were very common in North America up until 5 million years ago; they were everywhere. And now you can match any bone from any rhino to its species.

And what's next?

Camels. I'm the only one working on North American camels, and there are tons of undescribed species. Camels were late arrivals to Eurasia. They were almost exclusively a North American group and were isolated here until around three-and-a-half million years ago. And they were all without humps. We have fossil camels with necks like giraffes, antelope-like camels, and gazelle-like camels. It's one example of how many amazing things went on that people don't know about.

So the prehistoric world was more complex than most of us imagine.

Most people have never heard of these mammals. They've heard of the saber-toothed cat and maybe the woolly mammoth, but dinosaurs so dominate the public image of paleontology that people don't realize there are just as many weird and cool animals in other groups. The difference is that we have extraordinarily better fossil records of mammals than we have of dinosaurs.

Is the work of paleontology centered on rethinking what we thought we knew about prehistoric life?

We spend a lot of time synonymizing, which is getting rid of duplicate names for the same thing. For example, the guy who named brontosaurus and apatosaurus, which came out of the same quarry, wrongly named every specimen that came out of that site as a different genus. Brontosaurus was the most complete one he got, so that went on display and into everyone's memory. But it's not the first one he described. That was apatosaurus, and the rule is that the name of the first usable specimen gets priority and everything else has to be synonymized. The work is endless and it may not be glamorous, but it has to be done.