Jurassic Park

After Stewart hung up, he stepped to the office next door to speak to Ed McCord, his longtime friend and the college's director of programming. McCord also supervised the Yellowstone program.

"This is either the craziest thing to ever come down the pike, or it's something we ought to pay attention to," said Stewart, an easy-listening, avuncular man whose students call him "Doc."

McCord, a meticulous planner and compulsive organizer, visited the nearby Carnegie Museum of Natural History to learn about dinosaurs. Carnegie, it turned out, had been a major player in the "bone wars" that straddled the beginning of Wyoming's 20th century. Museum paleontologists had dug all over Wyoming's portion of the Morrison Formation -- but not at Spring Creek--and in 1898 had unearthed Diplodocus carnegii, named after the museum's benefactor. Andrew Carnegie was so tickled that he sent replicas of "Dippy" to the British Museum, the czar of Russia and the king of Spain.

McCord realized that the acquisition of Spring Creek could mark the museum's triumphant return to Wyoming, and he enlisted Carnegie as a collaborator. The possibilities were looking better, but "winter was coming," he said, "and we needed to get out there to meet the landlord."

McCord remembers the subsequent journey -- in November 2000 -- as an epic adventure: landing in Laramie in a blizzard; traveling along the highway behind Cook's snowplow; golden eagles killing and eating rabbits in the snow; winds howling over a bleak white landscape with temperatures at 5 degrees below zero. As they drove through the ranch, Cook left open gates so the pronghorn antelope could find shelter. Pronghorn are blindingly fast, but they won't jump fences.

Stewart and McCord stayed several days, spending most of the time inside talking with Cook while they waited for the weather to clear. They explained how they planned to turn Spring Creek into a summer field facility for undergraduates and a research site for scholars. They would dig dinosaurs, they said, but they would also map Native American campgrounds, do experiments in high desert habitat and study the pronghorn, elk, deer, prairie dogs, foxes, eagles, burrowing owls and mountain plovers that lived there.

Cook was impressed. They had the right ideas, and they had been serious enough to come see him: "They were real aggressive in thinking about doing new things."

Stewart and McCord were equally impressed. Cook was a "square-shooter and a forthright guy," Stewart said, "somebody who would close a deal with a handshake."

But despite what McCord called Cook's "generous spirit," both visitors understood that Cook wanted to get his money's worth. It took six years and one near miss with the Nature Conservancy, which almost had a deal with Cook, before Cook called Stewart in September 2005.

"Alec, this is Allen Cook. You still interested in this property?"

"Sure," Stewart replied.

"I've had a couple of good years in the cattle business," Cook said. "I might be interested in making a gift."

And he was. He wanted to grant Pitt unrestricted access and use of the property, but Pitt found that arrangement contractually complicated. Instead, it paid Cook $1 million and took outright title to the land. The deal was signed December 18, so Cook could have it in hand before the end of the tax year.

"Just like that," Stewart said. "After three years of frustration and two years of nothing, we had three minutes of orgasmic success."

IN MARCH, Stewart and McCord convened a meeting with officials from Carnegie and the University of Wyoming, Pitt's other collaborator. Stewart urged the delegates to join him and McCord in a June field trip to size up the property.

It was a large crowd. McCord commandeered Medicine Bow's somewhat down-at-the-heels Virginian hotel, hard by the Union Pacific tracks. The food was good, and the flowered carpet and brocade decor had an authentic, albeit dog-eared, "Gunsmoke" feel. Rooms were small and airless, though, and the plumbing was too frequently down the hall. Medicine Bow itself was mostly abandoned, a grid of perhaps four dusty streets in either direction, with one gas station and a convenience store where you could buy fuses and plug tobacco. The local high school had shut down around 1996 -- ads for the prom were still posted on the bulletin boards. Trains cannonballed through town every 20 minutes or so, past a station where no one ever stopped anymore.

The locals said not to let the solitude be a hindrance. "The growing season is short and cool, population is small, and only 3 or 4 percent of the land is cultivable," said University of Wyoming botanist Dennis Knight. "Denver [about three hours away on the highway going south] is a big metropolis and a real nice place to live, and people ask, 'How do you stand it up here?' Well, it's easy. Wilderness is the whole point."

But Pitt's presence was anything but "dudes on parade." Paleontologists, archaeologists and earth scientists, regardless of where they teach, make their reputations in the backlands, and the delegates quickly adjusted to the hardships of the Virginian, taking refuge in a well-worn but pleasant hotel bar festooned with mezzotints of Western bad men ranging from Bat Masterson to Billy the Kid.

The Carnegie contingent wasn't very optimistic about Spring Creek's dinosaurs. True, the pedigree was immaculate, but the shale and mud stones of the semitropical river swamp that had been Wyoming 150 million years ago had been picked over pretty thoroughly. Carnegie itself had built probably the nation's finest collection of large sauropods by quarrying the Morrison, and the old, nearby digs at Como Bluff, Sheep Creek and Bone Cabin were legendary in paleontology.

But that was then. The hot spots today, the Carnegie folks explained, are relatively new excavations in China and Mongolia, on the fringes of the Gobi Desert and in the windswept badlands of Argentine Patagonia. Some of these formations are Jurassic, but they also include earlier and later deposits. Most important, though, the sites are relatively pristine, so almost everything that comes out of them is a brand-new discovery. Wyoming's heyday ended a century ago.

The field trip began on a bright late spring morning. Delegates piled into SUVs and fell into single file behind the Pitt vans driven by McCord and graduating senior Clay Magill, an engaging ex-Marine with two colors of hair and a geology fellowship to Cambridge University in the fall.

McCord had set up a few tepees on a bluff turned yellow by last year's bleached, uneaten grass. New growth was poking through, but slowly. Wyoming is enduring a years-long drought and will be lucky to see 13 inches of rain this year.

This bit of intelligence came from Allen Cook, who arrived quietly with son Gabe in a pickup truck. Cook wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt with the cuffs down, blue jeans and boots. No hat, no shades and not much small talk. He greeted Stewart and McCord and lingered in the background during a brief opening ceremony that extolled his virtues. McCord displayed a sign he had prepared in Pittsburgh and stashed in one of the vans: "Allen L. Cook, Spring Creek Preserve, University of Pittsburgh."

If Cook was gratified, he didn't let on. "I've never been a benefactor before," he told Stewart.

"Well, you are now," Stewart replied.

The delegates climbed back into the SUVs, with Trujillo leading the caravan to the dinosaur beds. The Carnegie paleontologists were mildly interested when Trujillo showed them a string of sauropod vertebrae, each one about the size of a softball, lying in a row on a dusty stretch of ground along with a limb bone as big as a park bench. Nothing unusual there.

Still, the vertebrae were articulated -- arranged in a natural pattern that suggested the animal's carcass, and the site itself, had never been disturbed. And they were lying loose on the surface, an indication that more, perhaps much more, of the creature might lurk below.

Then Carnegie's Zhe-Xi Luo, a world-renowned expert in early mammals, held up the fossilized grooved claw of a small predatory dinosaur lying nearby in the dust: "These are very rare" in this part of Wyoming, Luo's colleague Matt Lamanna said with excitement. "I can't believe you found this."

Moments later, a Pitt archaeology student held up the petrified tooth of what might have been an allosaurus, a Jurassic predator: "That's either a juvenile example of a known animal, or a new species of very small animal," Lamanna said, with another grin. "And this isn't even a dig! This is just a few people messing around."

Spring Creek had passed its biggest test. As advertised, it was an untouched slice of one of the richest dinosaur beds ever dug and, as such, was "the perfect example of the Morrison not being played out," Luo said. "These other sites were hurt in a big way while the search focused on the big dinosaurs, but it's just a matter of time before we come up with diverse forms of early mammals. We didn't have information for this area. Now we will."

There is plenty of information to get. In relatively recent years, paleontologists have targeted the Jurassic Era to answer key evolutionary questions that were never posed in the days when excavators were digging monsters from the Morrison.

Since then, scientists such as Luo have shown that Jurassic mammals were larger and far more diverse than the shrew-like creatures that were found by earlier discoverers. Most of these Jurassic lineages died out, but it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the ancestors of modern mammals may turn up in a Jurassic formation.

Paleontologists are also interested in finding out whether feathered dinosaurs, which appear relatively frequently in later formations, existed during the Jurassic. After all, archaeopteryx, the first known bird, is a Jurassic animal.

But, most of all, by using modern techniques to excavate untainted sites such as Spring Creek, scientists will gain information about the Jurassic ecosystem -- the plant life, the climate, the water supply and the geography of a world inhabited both by finger-size mammals and the largest land creatures ever to roam the Earth.

During the rest of that day and the next, the delegates hiked over Spring Creek, studying plants, prairie dogs, pronghorn and the ancient sites where Native Americans had placed rings of stones to hold the edges of their tepees down. Anthropologists found a quartzite outcrop that had been used to quarry knives and

arrowheads thousands of years ago. They found exploded stones that had been heated in campfires then dumped into cook pots made of skins sunk into depressions in the ground. Ceramics don't travel well, the anthropologists explained, so nomadic peoples heat stew by tossing hot stones in it. They explode, but the shards sink to the bottom so you don't eat them.

"There are thousands of years of history to be told here," said University of Wyoming anthropology chairman Robert Kelly. But telling it is a matter of finding "a little bit here, a little bit there," he added. Nomads don't build sites and don't leave ruins.

For Stewart and McCord, the trip confirmed their fondest hopes. Besides the dinosaurs and the archaeology, the property was a bird sanctuary, had a prairie dog town and would serve elegantly as a laboratory for mountain ecology.

McCord suggested students might survey the property and design the encampment for the summer program that would probably begin next year. He handed out copies of a Hemingway essay on fishing in Wyoming, gave delegates pocket editions of The Virginian to go with their commemorative T-shirts and thought about adding a Western literature course to the summer curriculum.

Cook stuck around for the first day and hosted a barbecue in a tent next to his house on the second. He was polite but unobtrusive. Yet during a long conversation in his parlor, it was clear he was pleased with a choice that, in the end, had been quite simple.

"I trust Alec and Ed," he said. "I feel very strongly about them."

Guy Gugliotta, a former Post reporter, is a freelance writer living in New York.