Secrets of "Secrets Of The Dinosaur Mummy", or: How I Got An IMDb Entry

A few days back I did something I hadn't done since 2008: I watched "Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy". This was mostly because I had a friend over and wanted to show her what the Leonardo thing was all about, along with my minor claim to small-screen fame. Obviously going that road brought out the memories, so I thought maybe it was time to have a look back. Getting the "Truth in Advertising" out of the way up-front: I don't actually have a lot of secrets about "Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy", but I do know a title when I see one!

It turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to get a good photo of the cover, being moderately glossy and dark, but you get the idea. One of these two blurbs is good for a chuckle, given the prominence of the speaker in the documentary.

I haven't been very interested in watching dinosaur documentaries since I was a teenager, which is fair enough because I'm definitely not the intended audience. I had even less reason to want to rewatch this one, because of my own involvement. I was involved with the Leonardo project as a graduate student for about three years, fall 2003 through the end of spring 2006. For good or bad it was never what one might consider a typical graduate project (few graduate projects include parades and small-town festivals, a co-investigator getting busted for fossil theft, or a documentary) and by the end I was mostly happy to have finished. "Be careful what you wish for" and all that. It's still not easy to try to be objective.

Did you think I made up that bit about the parade? Friend, I'm on the flatbed, behind the inflatable dinosaur. Came in from the field with Karen Chin and Dave Eberth, somebody said "hey, would you like to be in the parade?", next thing you know...

Fifteen years between viewings is long enough to forget a lot of things. If I'd been called to the stand to describe my own appearance in the documentary, I'd have said I was in for less than 30 seconds near the very beginning, carrying a tray of fossils and speaking a line in voiceover. I'd have been wrong on almost every point. The short CU-Boulder sequence featuring me and my graduate advisor Karen Chin did not begin until about 12 minutes. I didn't carry a tray; instead, I cut and polished an item (probably a coprolite from another project Karen was working on, as the scene was filmed in 2008) and looked at it. Most surprising, I actually had about ten seconds of speech with the camera on me, plus a voiceover.

Damn, I was a kid then! (And the hair was outstanding. Figures. You decide what you want to do with your hair, then it starts jumping ship. Oh, well, at least this exists.) In case you were wondering, this is down in the bowels of the CU paleontology collections, and yes, I am wearing a white lab coat.

As anyone who has been filmed for a documentary can tell you, there was a lot more that was recorded than those seconds of screentime. I'd been invited to join the X-ray work that makes up of the midsection of the show in 2006, but had to pass because I was finishing up my thesis at the same time. Instead, the stars aligned in April of 2008 for me to return to Boulder to do some filming for a day along with Karen. We recreated parts of our analytical process and did some other "Doing Science" things for visually attractive filler, and both of us gave spiels about aspects of our research. Karen gave part of hers in the CU natural history museum; a couple of young relatives were visiting and were given the opportunity to walk around in the background of the shot. We ended up redoing the speech about a dozen times, not the most fun thing for the poor kids. Then, of course, the scene wasn't used in the final cut. All in all, a memorable experience. And that's how I ended up in the IMDb.

How was the rest of the show, though? Well, this was 2008, so of course there will be CGI dinosaurs, and given this is not cinematic there are some bumps. In particular, physics sometimes seems like a casual acquaintance of the dinosaurs, who move too fast for animals of their bulk. Inevitably large theropods arrive to commit atrocities on the hadrosaurs, in the middle of a massive tropical storm (daspletosaurs like most villains not being noted for their ability to prioritize). One manages to effortlessly pick up and toss the heroic but overmatched Leonardo into a nearby body of water. I will say, though, that the effect of the "visible Leonardo" used several times is a nice touch.

A wide swath of paleontologists, geologists, and others are there to talk about Leonardo and other aspects of the project. In fact, if you're a fan of the 1985 "Dinosaur!" documentary with Christopher Reeve, you may appreciate this simply for the opportunity to see Bob Bakker and Jack Horner two decades later. The narrator plays it fairly straight, although the musical cues aren't quite so restrained, and there is plenty of arm-waving and speculation to go around. There is excited interpretation of X-ray images. Leonardo receives a Rasputinian death, first being bitten and flung by a daspletosaur, then staggering across a river, and finally drowning in a storm surge. Speculation about the unusual "mummy dinosaurs" of the Sternbergs ends up seemingly turning into an implication that all mummy dinosaurs were dispatched and buried the same way at the same time, by a tropical storm moving up the Western Interior Seaway. (I'm not sure that's what they intended to get across, but that's the impression I got.)

To date, none of the interpretations of the internal imagery featured in the show have ever been published. In fact, over the years there has been little published on Leonardo in comparison to the hype. Original impresario Nate Murphy plus co-researchers Dave Trexler and Mark Thompson had one article in an edited volume (Murphy et al. 2006), and that silly graduate student got one paper out the same year as the documentary (Tweet et al. 2008) and another ten years after graduating (Tweet et al. 2016). (Persistence pays off?)

In hindsight, one of the more interesting aspects of the documentary is the low-key way it handles the involuntary departure of Murphy from the project. From the standpoint of a cynical 2024 observer this was initially surprising, since any stereotypical TV executive-type worth their salt would kill for major controversy as opposed to more mundane drama such as "X-ray machines aren't working, until they are". On further reflection, a couple of explanations present themselves: not having enough time in the documentary to include the situation in any detail without shorting the intended story and reworking the whole thing; and legal considerations.

References

Murphy, N. L., D. Trexler, and M. Thompson. 2006. "Leonardo," a mummified Brachylophosaurus from the Judith River Formation. Pages 117–133 in K. Carpenter, editor. Horns and beaks: ceratopsian and ornithopod dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Tweet, J. S., K. Chin, D. R. Braman, and N. L. Murphy. 2008. Probable gut contents within a specimen of Brachylophosaurus canadensis (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous Judith River Formation of Montana. Palaios 23(9): 624–635.

Tweet, J., K. Chin, and A. A. Ekdale. 2016. Trace fossils of possible parasites inside the gut contents of a hadrosaurid dinosaur, Upper Cretaceous Judith River Formation, Montana. Journal of Paleontology 90(2): 279–287.