Blackfeet Tribe's premier fossil up for bid
By ERIC NEWHOUSE 

 BROWNING — Facing worsening budget shortfalls, the Blackfeet Nation is trying to sell off one of its treasures — a perfectly preserved 74-million-year-old baby dinosaur.

"Some people do want to sell off that dinosaur," Blackfeet Chairman Earl Old Person said last week. "And the business council has authorized it."

That decision has some folks concerned at the prospect of the dinosaur being lost to the people of Montana. Instead, they say, the tribe should build a dinosaur museum to showcase its treasure. They point to the ongoing revenue the new dinosaur museum in Malta will attract through its loan of a mummy dinosaur, Leonardo, to a major museum in Houston.

Sue Frary of the Judith River Dinosaur Institute in Malta said dinosaurs can be profitable without selling them, citing win-win cooperative agreements between museums.Nicknamed Cameron, the dinosaur is the smallest and most complete skeleton of a juvenile tyrannosaur ever found in North America.

"It's only missing the feet and the end of the tail," said paleontologist Jack Horner of Bozeman's Museum of the Rockies.

The fossilized ancestor of the tyrannosaur also contains a wishbone, which some consider evidence that dinosaurs were related to birds.

Dale and Patty Fenner, Blackfeet ranchers and outfitters, found the skeleton in 1995, after the tribe gave them permission to explore for fossils on the reservation. The Fenners scoured the Two Medicine area for four years before making the find.

They held onto the 10-foot-long skeleton for three years so it would not leave the reservation.

The couple then turned it over to Horner, who spent three years chipping the hard rock matrix from around the bones and making an exact replica of the skeleton in Bozeman before returning the original to Browning in 2003, where it has been on display in the Blackfeet Heritage Center, right next door to the Museum of the Plains Indian. At the time, Dale Fenner said he was "elated" that the skeleton was back home.

"If you want to see that baby, you're going to have to go to Browning," Horner said five years ago.

Three years later, a group of Californians sponsored by Searching for Bigfoot Inc. began investigating a suspicious carcass found near Kiowa. Once it learned of Cameron, the group began negotiating for the baby dinosaur, which is believed to have been about 2 years old when it fell into a stream, died and was fossilized.

"Searching for Bigfoot was very interested," said Reis Fisher, director of procurement for the tribe. "They offered us $5 million last January.

"But some people thought we might be able to get more money, so we pulled it off the market and began searching for other buyers," said Fisher, the former CEO of the Blackfeet Hospital in Browning before his retirement a few years ago.
He described himself as a reluctant salesman.

"I thought we should have started our own (dinosaur) museum," he said. "We're in the Two Medicine Formation, which is one of the best fossil beds in the nation.

"I was in favor of keeping it and starting our own museum, but there were some pros and cons about that," Fisher said.

Unable to find any other buyers, Fisher said he has again contacted Searching for Bigfoot Inc. to determine whether it's still interested in purchasing the rare fossil.
The Blackfeet Tribe's finances, which have been steadily worsening in recent years, hit a new low last fall with a scathing audit by Forensic Solutions LLC of Fargo, N.D.

It stated that a 2002 audit recommended five corrective actions, but none were taken. The most recent audit also found that no action was taken on five recommendations in 2003, and nine of 10 recommendations in 2004 were ignored.

"There is evidence of pervasive corruption in almost every department," the Oct. 18, 2007, audit concluded.

"The common theme for fraud appears to be personal use of tribal vehicles, credit cards, travel vouchers, abuse of grant money and political cronyism," it states.

"Further investigations might uncover more schemes such as ghost employees, shell corporations, unauthorized bank accounts and other criminal conspiracies."

The tribal council fired longtime treasurer Joe Gervais a week after the audit.
Both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service have sanctioned the tribe, providing grant money in monthly installments rather than in a $7 million lump sum at the beginning of the year, said acting Treasurer Ken Augare.

The tribe recently submitted documentation for its 2005 audit and hopes to have the 2006 audit ready to submit by June, he said. However, the tribe's financial paperwork is a mess, he said.

"We started looking at some of our accounts and found they were not as clean as we would have liked, so we put our audit back until we could clean them up," Augare said.

In 2006, the tribe borrowed $9 million from a Great Falls bank and received a $1 million line of credit, he said, adding there may have been other loans that year as well.

"And we're showing that our cash flow that year was a negative $1 million," Augare said.

His mission is to cut back spending until the tribe lives within its budget.

"To me, the way we got in this position is that we overspent for a number of years in a row and had to borrow money to correct our overspending," Augare said. "The key to me is correcting our spending and staying within budget.
"The only other way is to find extra resources, and that's what that dino represents," he said.

Some paleontologists are appalled that the tribe is considering selling what they say is a priceless treasure.

Horner said he assumed that donating the skeleton back to the tribe would keep it in the public domain.

"When they get it sold, all you can really hope for is that it goes to a museum, not a little object in someone's living room," he said.

"We were hoping that it would remain in the public domain for research, but without something else in place, it may not. We took a chance," Horner said.

In a letter to Fisher last month, paleontologist David Trexler of the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center urged the tribe to keep the specimen in the pubic domain.

"Although fossils are common, museum-quality fossils are rare," he wrote.

"In particular, the tyrannosaur specimen mentioned above is one of the best preserved dinosaurs ever discovered in the Two Medicine Formation," the letter states. "That specimen is not replaceable."

Horner and Trexler say the dinosaur is too valuable to lose. They suggest charging admission to see it and positioning it as the star of a new dinosaur museum in Browning.

"From a purely economic standpoint, a dinosaur museum is a money-maker," Trexler wrote to Fisher. "Our small facility in Bynum was started with zero assets and last year grossed over $100,000."

Frary, of the Judith River Dinosaur Institute in Malta, said her facility struck gold by loaning Leonardo, a perfectly preserved 77-million-year-old duckbill, to the Houston Museum of Natural Science for 18 months.

"Houston is thrilled with having this animal there, so much so that that they're going to come up to Montana at the end of May to showcase this area," Frary said. "This is a cooperative relationship between two museums that benefits both of us."

Basically, the Judith Basin Dinosaur Center is renting out Leonardo, she said.

"But a lot more people will see him there and learn about Malta than would come through here in a decade," Frary said.

When Leonardo comes home, he'll be housed in a new museum, much of which will be paid for by profits from the rental agreement, she said. The state of Montana also chipped in half a million dollars in startup funds.

"There's a way of putting your dinosaurs to work for you," she said. "A lot of people see the extremes: You sell it and make a lot of money or keep it and not make any money.

"But there's a whole range of options in between that are win-win situations."

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LODGEPOLE GALLERY

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Last edited on Mon Apr 14th, 2008 04:36 am by Dixie Banshee