Dispatches the Plumber and the T. Rex

In the movie Jurassic Park, dinosaur fossils are found by a jet-setting paleontologist with a millionaire benefactor and a glamorous female assistant. In real life the relics are more often discovered by the likes of Stan Sacrison, 37, a plumber and electrician who likes to wander around sheep ranches near his home in Buffalo, South Dakota, looking for prehistoric bones. Last May, while scrambling up the side of a butte, he noticed an unusually large pelvic bone and three sun-bleached vertebrae poking out of the siltstone. "I could tell right away it was a Tyrannosaurus rex, because they're really distinctive," he says. "I was pretty excited."

Although Sacrison describes himself as an amateur paleontologist who has never traveled outside his own time zone, he is too modest. In a sense, he has spent more time in the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, than many professionals. Since he found his first dinosaur bone, a triceratops vertebra, at age 8, he has scoured the landscape looking for more artifacts of the distant past. Counting his latest discovery, he has found two of the world's 14 known skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex. Sacrison helped excavate the first last year, only a quarter-mile from his latest find.

The dinosaur burial ground, now a dry, undulating pasture of sage and buffalo grass just below the North Dakota border, was once a subtropical floodplain, where dinosaurs roamed amid palm trees and ferns on the edge of a dying inland sea. One day a mature male T. rex, weighing up to five tons and measuring nearly 40 feet in length, died in a silty washout. At least two albertosaurs, sharp-toothed scavengers about half T. rex's size, fed on the carcass, leaving a few of their teeth behind. Within months a river overflowed its banks and swept the bones away, eventually covering them with a three-foot $ layer of silt, which preserved them for eternity--and Stan Sacrison.

After his discovery, Sacrison called Peter Larson, the president of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, in Hill City, South Dakota. Larson is a controversial figure in the world of paleontology: last year, after he announced that he was excavating the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, the U.S. Attorney impounded the skeleton, contending that it had been illegally removed from government-owned land. Larson disagrees, and the institute is suing. But there is no dispute over Sacrison's latest find, which Larson named Duffy, in honor of his lawyer. After getting the landowner's permission, Sacrison, Larson and a score of volunteers set up camp and began excavating Duffy with shovels, dental picks and toothbrushes.

So far, they have found about 20% of the skeleton, but they are certain the rest is nearby. Meanwhile, Sacrison plans to look for more skeletons. If he has the time, he would also like to see Jurassic Park. "I hear," he says, "it has great special effects."

It does, Stan, but the paleontologist isn't very realistic.