7-Year-Old's Dinosaur Find Raises Montana Land Debate

BELLINGHAM - Like a lot of 7-year-olds, Alex Parker is into dinosaurs. He reads up on them, watches documentaries about them, and carefully plots the sites of paleontological digs.

Last month - after considerable hounding from Alex - his parents, Janine and Bruce Parker, agreed to take him bone hunting in Montana.

"He never let up on it, and every time we'd do something, he'd ask, `When are we going to look for dinosaurs?' " Bruce recalled.

"I just wanted to find dinosaurs," Alex said.

But what started out as an innocent outing for the Bellingham family has sparked a controversy with landowners who are tired of bone hunters digging up their land.

After touring a Museum of the Rockies dig on Egg Mountain, the Parkers decided to do some digging of their own just down the road. They thought they were still on the Egg Mountain project's land, Bruce Parker said, but instead had wandered onto the ranch of Bob Peebles and his family.

Right next to where they parked their car, Bruce Parker began finding bones in an eroded wash.

The dinosaur kept getting bigger as they kept digging. They found bones from the spine, ribs, teeth, pelvis, jaw, nose, eye socket and head. Eventually, they realized the find might be significant and reported it to scientists.

Scientists think the bones may be from a tyrannosaurid - a smaller relative of the meat-eating tyrannosaurus rex.

"Dinosaur finds at this point still are amazing," said David Trexler, curator of paleontology at the nearby Old Trail Museum in Choteau, Mont.

"There's so much that we don't know that any discovery has potential scientific importance," he said.

Regardless of whether the find turns out to be significant, the Peebles family isn't appreciative.

The family ranch is strewn with dinosaur remains, and since scientists began taking interest in them about a decade ago, the Peebleses have had to deal with preservationists, trespassers and fortune hunters, among others.

"The entire area looks like a huge badlands and there are bones virtually everyplace," Peebles said. "It's caused a lot of trauma and heartache."

Peebles wants to start charging people to dig on the land, although he isn't sure how much. And he thinks he could sell the bones of the Parkers' find to investors for thousands of dollars, although he'd rather aid research.

Scientists are reluctant to speculate on the possible importance of the Parkers' find, fearing they'd inflame the controversy.

"We won't know for sure what it was unless we can take out the rest of the bones," said Jack Horner, a paleontologist at Montana State University and curator of the Museum of the Rockies. "If they dig it up and take it away, we may never know what it was."