Discovery & deception: Raptor finds, turtle tales

On July 31, 2002, the same day a juvenile duck-billed dinosaur nicknamed Peanut was found on the Hammond ranch north of Malta, Mark Thompson discovered pieces of what appeared to be raptor fossil within shouting distance of the Peanut site.

Thompson is an Australian field geologist who first worked under Nate Murphy as a paying customer and later as an unpaid volunteer for four summers. Thompson said it was an exciting find because the raptor was very small and had delicate, hollow bones that ordinarily would have been crushed before they could be preserved.

He named it Julieraptor, after his sister.

Tim Quarles, a friend and longtime associate of Murphy, was out on the dig the day Peanut and Julieraptor were discovered, as was Murphy's son, Matt. Quarles and Thompson said Murphy asked them to keep the raptor's existence secret because he was trying to negotiate a new agreement with the ranch owners, Howie and JoAnn Hammond. Thompson had collected a few dozen fragments of the creature from the surface - carefully photographing the fossils and the site - but Murphy kept asking him to postpone going back for a full excavation.

In an e-mail from Australia, Thompson said Murphy was always making new excuses, some of them involving Leonardo, Murphy's most famous discovery from the Hammond ranch.

"Nate had been playing both sides off each other," Thompson wrote, "telling the Hammonds I was trying to undermine their share of Leonardo to the foundation, and he was telling me all about the greedy Hammonds doing the same thing!"

This went on for four years, until the summer of 2006, when Murphy said the excavation could finally take place. Thompson was all ready to fly over but was told by Murphy that there were problems, so he stayed put.

A few weeks later, Thompson called Murphy and was shocked to learn that Murphy and his son, Matt, had excavated the raptor site but supposedly had found nothing important, just a few more bones and pieces of vertebrae.

"It just didn't seem possible," Thompson said. "Their reaction and the way they described it didn't seem right. But what could I do from here?"

Enter the turtle

Murphy later took a crew of volunteers out to the ranch to remove what he described as a fossilized turtle. Whatever the specimen was, it was jacketed in plaster and taken to the Dinosaur Field Station in Malta, where Murphy was the curator of paleontology.

In October 2006, when paleontologist Bob Bakker and a gathering of other scientists and technicians were at the dinosaur field station to do some X-raying of Leonardo, Murphy suggested that they look at another fossil he had found - and he produced the jacketed specimen.

When the images came up, it was immediately obvious that it was some kind of raptor. Finding one raptor fossil in the vicinity of Malta was startling enough. Now here was Murphy saying he had found another one, on land near Saco. Murphy, with his flair for the dramatic, said he'd named it Sid Vicious.

That evening, at an event in the field station attended by the Hammonds, Bakker and Murphy made a presentation on the new raptor, and the Hammonds, like everyone else, believed the raptor came from Saco.

When Quarles heard about all this, he was confused. He had been a friend of Murphy's for years - he had accompanied Nate and Matt Murphy on their expedition to Patagonia - but now he was entertaining troubling suspicions.

He confided his misgivings to the Hammonds, telling them he thought the raptor being touted by Murphy was actually the Julieraptor, found on their land.

"I apologized in advance for the possibility that I might be wrong," he said. "It was a horrible thing to suggest."

Even so, Quarles figured the question could be settled easily if Murphy would take the Hammonds to the Julieraptor site and the Sid Vicious site, showing them notes, bones and photos from both sites and comparing the bones from each specimen with the numerous detailed photos Thompson took of Julieraptor. Quarles said Murphy refused to take any of those steps.

He had also, apparently, changed his story several times. Howie Hammond said Murphy first told him that he found the raptor north of Saco, then south of Saco. With others he stuck with the turtle story, saying that when the turtle fossil was being worked on, the raptor was discovered underneath it. Quarles said he and Thompson wondered facetiously whether the turtle and raptor had fought to the death.

"We were joking that this might have been the fighting turtle of the Cretaceous," he said.

Sid, meet Julie

Matters finally came to a head. Murphy had sent the raptor - the parts he and his son collected, as well as the pieces gathered on the surface by Mark Thompson, to Pete Larson at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research for molding and casting. He told Larson all the bones came from the raptor he had found, Sid Vicious.

To get to the bottom of the mess, the Hammonds sent Larson some of Thompson's pictures of the Julieraptor bones. The so-called "Sid Vicious" bones, Quarles said, "matched the bones in the photos of Julieraptor perfectly."

"If Mark hadn't taken all those beautiful photos," Quarles said, "they might have gotten away with it."

An assistant at the Black Hills Institute said Larson would not speak to the press, but he had been interviewed by state investigators.

The state's affidavit against Murphy said he signed an agreement with the Black Hills Institute under which Murphy's Judith River Dinosaur Institute was to receive all molds and casts and 20 percent royalties "on the sale of all cast specimens" of the raptor. Murphy's institute reserved the right to "make casts for sale." The affidavit said the raptor was worth $150,000 to $400,000.

The contract also specified that all sales must be accompanied by an acknowledgement that the original skeleton was owned by the Judith River Dinosaur Institute.

With all the different stories flying around, Murphy was under serious pressure to come clean. Bakker said he personally pushed Murphy to tell the Hammonds the truth.

But in an e-mail to Bakker, also quoted in the state's affidavit, Murphy said the Julieraptor consisted only of fragments, and that his specimen, Sid Vicious, was found near Saco and belonged solely to his dinosaur institute. Bakker began referring to the specimen as the "kleptoraptor."

An admission, sort of

Murphy did finally admit to the state investigator that the raptor was not found in Saco after all. He also told the Hammonds that the raptor was from their ranch, but he repeated his claims about having found it beneath the turtle, and he still insisted it was different from the raptor found by Thompson.

Bakker said the X-rays of the raptor he saw that October day at the field station showed no signs of a turtle, and "there was no talk of any turtle." When Bakker visited the Julieraptor site, there was a tiny piece of turtle nearby, but broken bits of turtle shells are common at dig sites, he said.

"From the very first discovery," Bakker said in an e-mail to The Gazette, "Nate and Matt knew darn well that there was a raptor, and that's what they were excited about. Stray bits of turtles may have been mixed nearby - but no one talked about them."

As if the story wasn't complicated enough, Howie Hammond also determined, based on GPS coordinates supplied to him by Thompson, that the site where Juleiraptor had been found wasn't even on his land. It was on land the Hammonds leased from another rancher, Bruce Bruckner, who had never given Murphy permission to dig.

As a result of the state investigation into the raptor case, it was discovered that Murphy had found two other fossil sites on Aug. 10, 2006, and it was later determined that both sites were on BLM land.

The way the federal charge against Murphy was ultimately structured, his guilty plea was an admission that he acted with "willful ignorance or blindness," meaning he "took deliberate actions to avoid confirming suspicions of criminality."

Murphy was said to be aware of a "high probability of criminality" but "deliberately avoided learning the truth." Specifically, though GPS coordinates were taken for both sites on federal land, Murphy failed to plot the coordinates, which would have shown him exactly where he was. Instead, he and his crew started excavating.

A reason to be cautious

Brian Cornell, the special agent with the BLM in Billings, said the government was adamant about prosecuting this case because it should have been obvious that the dig was on federal land. In some cases, people are so close to the private land where they're permitted to dig that the feds don't pursue charges.

In this case, he said, one of the sites excavated by Murphy was 178 feet inside federal land, and the other was 233 feet. And Murphy had special reason to be cautious in that area because the Elvis find, which was also on federal land but for which he was not prosecuted, was just 900 feet from the new sites.

On March 9, Murphy pleaded guilty in Phillips County District Court to the state charge of felony theft. Sentencing is scheduled for May 27 and state prosecutors are recommending a five-year deferred sentence and a $2,500 fine. Murphy, as part of the plea agreement, reserved the right to ask for a three-year deferred sentence.

On the federal charge of stealing fossils from BLM land, Murphy pleaded guilty on April 14, with sentencing scheduled for July 9. The maximum penalty is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, but prosecutors have said they are unlikely to seek prison time.

Last September, after the state charges were filed, Murphy told The Gazette: "There are a lot of outside circumstances that aren't being reported. I haven't been able to tell my side of the story. When everything is put out there - it's about money and prestige."

The day he pleaded guilty on the federal charge, Murphy's attorney, Mike Moses of Billings, said his client "was chomping on the bit" to tell his side of the story. Since then, Moses and Murphy have turned down multiple interview requests.

About the same time Murphy was being charged with theft, odd, troubling revelations started to circulate among Murphy's associates. It seemed that while he was skirting the law, Murphy had also been spinning fanciful tales about his own life.

Coming Wednesday: A bogus bio, a derailed career