Fossil Poachers find Easy Pickings on Federal Lands

Barbara Beasley of the U.S. Forest Service points to exposed dinosaur fossils at a spot in the Oglala National Grasslands in Nebraska where fossil poachers dug. Evidence of poachers, such as holes and excavating tools,have more frequently been found on the grasslands in recent years. (AP Photo/Margery Beck)

Barbara Beasley was the first person called to investigate when three suspicious men were stopped on federal land in remote northwestern Nebraska.

It didn't take the U.S. Forest Service official long to find what they had been doing: digging an 18- by 10-foot hole more than 2 feet deep that left the fossilized bones of a prehistoric rhinoceros called a brontothere exposed. Plaster used to take casts of the bones and excavating tools also were found.

The men, it turns out, were poaching fossils on federal land - a practice the U.S. Forest Service says has become rampant in recent years at Oglala National Grasslands near Toadstool Geological Park.

The men, arrested in 2003, were among the handful who are ever caught stealing fossils from federal land and the only ones in decades to be convicted in Nebraska's federal courts. That's mainly because there is only one federal law-enforcement officer to patrol 1.1 million acres of federal forest land in Nebraska and South Dakota, said Jerry Schumacher, a spokesman for the Forest Service.

The low chances of getting caught and the volcanic dust of the grasslands that preserves the bones of prehistoric animals make it easy for those with even the most elementary knowledge of archaeology to walk onto the land and take what they want.

In fact, the size of the hole left by the men suggested they had been digging for several days, Beasley said.

"Very seldom do we actually catch people in the act," she said.

The poachers range from those hoping to sell fossils on the black market to academics to those who simply have their curiosity piqued by a show on dinosaurs.

The Forest Service has averaged one arrest a year in the past decade, Beasley said, but most of those have come in the past few years as the Forest Service put more effort into stopping fossil poaching.

That's where Beasley comes in. She has worked for the U.S. Forest Service for nearly 14 years, but not in law enforcement. She's a paleontologist. She and others who often conduct field work on federal lands have undergone training to be forest-protection officers. That gives them the authority to investigate criminal cases but not to carry firearms.

These days, evidence of poaching shows up nearly every week, Beasley said. Exposed holes and excavation tools are routinely found on the federally protected grasslands. Of more than 162 grassland areas identified in the 1990s as holding fossils, about 30 percent showed evidence of poaching, Beasley said.

Other evidence shows up at fossil shows, in catalogs and on Internet auction sites, where dinosaur fossils turn up by the hundreds.