Peter Larson Goes To Jail

Malcolm W. Browne

Peter L. Larson, a commercial dealer accused of dinosaur hunting without a federal permit, left his South Dakota home Wednesday to surrender to federal authorities and begin serving a two-year prison term.

Although the felony charges that Larson had been convicted of had to do with carrying currency between the United States and two foreign countries, the object of prosecutors was to strike at unauthorized fossil collecting on federal land and at an international trade in fossils that involves millions of dollars a year.

Many academic paleontologists have denounced irresponsible fossil collecting by commercial dealers on federal land. But others, including Dr. John Ostrom of Yale University, have expressed uneasiness about what they regard as the overly restrictive regulation of fossil hunting.

Some, including Dr. Robert Bakker, a paleontologist and former faculty member of the University of Colorado, testified at Larson's trial on his behalf, describing Larson as a responsible paleontologist.

Patrick Duffy, Larson's lawyer, described the sentence handed down by Judge Richard Battey of U.S. District Court as "brutal." Duffy said Larson's wife and three children had been subjected to an "intolerable ordeal."

"We recently had a guy here in South Dakota who got off on probation, with no prison time, after killing his wife in a drunken rage," Duffy said in an interview. "Sentencing Pete Larson to two years sends a message that the American justice system is in deep trouble."

Larson and his associates at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in South Dakota had been embroiled in legal problems since 1992, when several dozen FBI agents and National Guardsmen raided the company's workshop in Hill City, S.D.

They seized a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil dubbed "Sue," regarded by scientists as they most complete tyrannosaur skeleton ever found. In that and in many subsequent raids, the Justice Department seized the company's records and many of its other fossils.

In 1990, Larson's associates had found the tyrannosaur fossil on reservation land owned by an Indian named Maurice Williams, who agreed to let the Black Hills Institute excavate and keep it in exchange for $5,000.

But later, after Larson and his colleagues began cleaning and restoring the bones, the U.S. attorney charged that the fossil had been illegally taken from land under federal administration. The dinosaur fossil was placed in storage at the South Dakota School of Mines, where it remains in crates. In 1994 a federal court ruled that title to the dinosaur belonged to Williams. He apparently will be permitted to dispose of it as he wishes.

Experts say the tyrannosaur fossil could bring as much as $5 million, particularly if it is sold in Japan.

A grand jury subsequently indicted Larson and four colleagues on 39 charges mostly related to trafficking in fossils illegally excavated from federal land.

In the trials that followed most of the charges were dismissed, but Larson was convicted of two felonies -- failure to report to American customs officials $31,700 in travelers checks he had brought from Japan, and failure to report $15,000 in cash he took to Peru. He was also convicted of two misdemeanors: illegally taking a fossil worth less than $100 from federal land, and illegally retaining another small fossil.

On Jan. 31, Battey sentenced Larson to two years in prison, ordering him to report to the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, on Feb. 22. Duffy said that several appeals were pending, but that Larson would have to report to the minimum-security prison.

Paleontologists are in broad agreement that the web of U.S. laws possibly applying to the collection of fossils is ambiguous and confusing. In some cases laws could be interpreted as banning field excursions by Boy Scouts as well as collecting expeditions by dealers.

Rep. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., introduced a bill this month aimed at clarifying the law. He said the measure "addresses the pressing problem of how to balance the need to preserve the natural resource of fossils with the right of the public to access federal lands."