Barry James places his hand on a fossilised triceratops at his home in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, on March 7. When his wife died, the paleontologist poured his grief into the reconstruction of a triceratops skeleton that they had started together. Photo / Caroline Gutman, The New York Times
The 159th skeleton to come across Barry James’ desk was potentially one of the largest triceratops ever found.
A colleague, Craig Pfister, had telephoned James, a commercial paleontologist, from Wyoming to discuss the astounding collection of bones, possibly worth as much as US$25 million.
Would James come out of retirement to reconstruct it?
The discovery fuelled James and his wife, April, his business partner and soul mate for 37 years.
For months, in what James described as “dino mania”, the couple undertook the painstaking work that had earned them a solid reputation in the fossil industry, where they were known as experts in the preparation of skeletons for sale to private collectors and museums.
As a team, they combined his meticulous scientific approach to fossil restoration with her artistic touch.
Fossils were glued together and mounted on metal structures to conjure, for example, the terrifying might of a T. rex or the elongated neck of a sauropod.
Now, amid what was perhaps the couple’s most ambitious project, April noticed a sharp pain in her lower back.
The doctors said she was really sick, gallbladder issues.
James said he and his wife persevered by focusing on what might be their last great collaboration.
As her husband gently airbrushed dirt from triceratops vertebrae like a dental hygienist removing plaque, she wrote poetry about dinosaurs and produced an illustrated children’s book about the triceratops, which she nicknamed Buddy.
Before she met James, April had held an eclectic assortment of jobs — raceway trophy girl, sandwich shop owner, and the impresario of a fibreglass business that outfitted racing boats and skateboards.
With James, she had committed to recreating prehistory, though now she was too sick to help with the bones as in years past.
Completing a dinosaur skeleton can take years, and April would not live to see the triceratops in full form.
She died on February 7, 2024, before James could even piece together the dinosaur’s facial bones and trademark frill.
During bereavement, James stopped working on the triceratops. It would be difficult to continue until his grief subsided.
But surrounded by the bones one day, an idea started to form — an unconventional way for him to honour April’s memory.
Nearly a year later, I arranged to meet Barry at his workshop in Pennsylvania, a renovated dairy barn.
It was a chilly day in March and the wind roared through the wooden panels of the workshop, where Barry had hung pterodactyl bones and John Lennon quotes.
The adjoining house was hidden on a hillside surrounded by forests and guarded by a pet graveyard dotted with scrap-metal sculptures that April had assembled to memorialise some 50 pets.
Friends had gathered that day to support Barry — and to reminisce about his wife.
“She had this creativity,” Dianne Fantaskey, one of April’s closest friends, said in an interview that day.
“She would be up until 3 or 4 in the morning writing notes and poetry. She was very prolific.”
“They were a definite team,” added Fantaskey, who said the couple never took a holiday even as April’s physical pain increased over the years.
“I really believe she sort of sacrificed herself for him and his business.”
Before we could talk about the dinosaur, James gave a house tour that started with a picture of his wife conversing with Yoko Ono. “They constantly exchanged poems back and forth,” he said.
Down the hallway was a door that hadn’t been opened in months.
It was April’s art studio, filled with drawings that she had started but never completed and a library of papers that contained her writing.
For once, Barry was speechless, allowing Pookie, his dog, to inspect the room before ushering her out.
Then we climbed the stairs to a secret room hidden behind a bookshelf, where the couple stored a collection of historical artifacts sourced from flea markets and auction houses.
The hoard included a musket from the Revolutionary War, an old Viking knife and a 1923 telephone from the United States Capitol Building.
“We were going to put a museum up here,” James said, explaining that he wanted to mix the historical objects and fossil replicas to educate students. But he said the town baulked.
James shrugged and continued down the hallway to his workshop.
The door opened to the jet-black frill of the triceratops skull, recently completed.
Apprentices had helped to fill the few gaps between its bones with chicken wire, modelling clay and plaster — helping to reassemble the fossil as April once did.
The skeleton and its hundreds of teeth were glued together using an adhesive similar to the kind used with model planes.
James has always taken a careful approach to restoring fossils, but he wanted to ensure this specimen — all 9 feet and 7 inches (3m) of Buddy — would have an unimpeachable record of repair.
“You can have all the bones you want, but what’s the point if you can’t put it together right?” James said.
“It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, only it’s about 10,000 pieces.”
The paleontologist promised he would eventually piece it all together. For now, April was on his mind.
When the couple started their business in the late 1980s, the Jurassic Park films had yet to turn dinosaurs into full-blown celebrities.
James was a talent scout in leather breeches, roaming the boneyards of the Hell Creek Formation in Montana and adjoining states, searching for the prehistoric version of a triple threat: rare pathology, a near-complete skeleton and a good backstory on the discovery.
As it became clear that billionaires would spend upward of US$30m on a single specimen, the industry became more competitive.
“A simple dinosaur bone in 2000 was selling for US$3000 — cleaned and mounted,” James said.
“Now it’s US$25,000 to US$35,000. I think what has happened is that a lot of wealthy people realised they could have a triceratops skull in their living rooms.”
Over time, James decided to switch completely to a less glamorous part of the business — the precise reconstruction of beasts that walked the Earth 60 million years ago.
His training was increasingly valuable in an industry that relies on the accuracy of scientific reports on the completeness and pathology of specimens.
“What makes anyone trustworthy?” said Pfister, the business owner who gave James the triceratops to assemble.
“It’s if they actually do what they say they’re going to do. I trust Barry to do the honest thing and represent what he has.”
By the time a doctor fully examined April in January 2024, it was too late. Her gallbladder had ruptured, flooding her body with a toxic bile that slowly caused organ failure.
When she died a month later, James was distraught.
He was a 74-year-old hippie in a cowboy hat, ambling through the workshop filled with hundreds of triceratops bones awaiting treatment.
That is when inspiration hit. His grief might subside if he could rename the triceratops after his dead wife.
Barry already had a dinosaur named after himself, a Camptosaurus.
He called up the dinosaur’s owner, Pfister, and said it was a non-negotiable part of the deal in which James is to receive roughly half of the proceeds.
“That’s the one thing,” James said. “No matter what museum and no matter what price, even if a collector is offering US$100m to name it after his son or daughter, I am not selling. I want this triceratops to remain named April.”
James said he already had collectors in places like Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi willing to spend US$25m on the dinosaur. But he was concerned that he will not be able to legally enforce his desire to retain April’s name in perpetuity.
Though it’s been almost two years now, James denies he’s delaying the triceratops’ completion because it would mean saying goodbye again to April.
But it is true, he acknowledged, that the dinosaur now serves, as April once did, as a compelling reason to get up in the morning.
“If I didn’t name it after April, I probably would have given up on it already,” he admitted.
“Because it is so devastating not having her here. I’m 74 and we were together for 37 years. That’s almost half my lifetime.
“Now I’m paying bills, which I have no clue how to do. I don’t know how to get on the computer,” he continued.
“And when I hang up the phone, I’m left with all these pictures of her, which make me realise that life wasn’t possible without her.”
In truth, he said, drawing me into his endeavour might help preserve her memory.
“Once you have the article out there, I don’t think anyone will change her name,” James confided.
But he knows the day will come when April the Triceratops needs to leave the workshop, perhaps to stand on someone else’s property or in a museum.
“The kids won’t care about April or Barry,” he said, cracking a smile. “They’ll just care if the dinosaur looks cool or scary.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Zachary Small
Photographs by: Caroline Gutman
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