An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

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O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope: A Rivalry

As the United States was recovering from the social and political turmoil of the Civil War, a rivalry emerged in the nascent field of American Paleontology. Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, former friends turned competing paleontologists, began scouring the American West for prehistoric fossil deposits in the hopes of discovering unknown species from the past. While the two scientists came from different backgrounds, their common passion for paleontology and mutual disdain for each other fueled their ambition, ultimately leading to the discovery of over a hundred new species in America. At the same time, their bitter rivalry damaged their reputations and left the two almost penniless at their deaths.


The term "paleontology" was coined just nine years before Othniel Charles Marsh's birth October 29, 1831 on a farm in Lockport, New York. At the time, it might have seemed hard to predict Marsh's future as one of America’s leading paleontologists. Marsh showed interest in science as a boy, and with the encouragement and financial backing of his millionaire uncle George Peabody, he was able to escape the family's farm, excelling first at Phillips Academy, and then at Yale, and later as a graduate student in Germany.
Yale Peabody Museum
O.C. Marsh


Edward Drinker Cope, born nine years after Marsh on July 28, 1840 to a wealthy family in Pennsylvania, took an immediate liking to natural history as a child and attended classes at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. At 18, Cope published his first scholarly article while working as a researcher at the Academy of Natural Sciences. In 1863, to avoid Cope being drafted into the Civil War, Cope's father sent his son to Germany to study natural history. There he met graduate student O.C. Marsh.
Yale Peabody Museum
E.D. Cope


In 1868, in an act of friendship, Cope had shown Marsh around a fossil quarry in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Behind Cope's back, however, Marsh made an agreement with the quarry owner to have any new fossils sent directly to him at Yale. Cope would later describe the act as the beginning of the end of their friendship.

Yale Peabody Museum
Employees of the Peabody Museum department of paleontology



The rivalry between the two paleontologists intensified as they each headed west to hunt for fossils. Marsh divided his attention between recovering as many fossils as possible in the yet unexplored region and his constant dread that Cope might retrieve a share of bones of equal quantity or interest. Marsh even went so far as to have spies track Cope's progress, referring to Cope by the codename "Jones.
American Museum of Natural History
Cope with a uintathere skull, ca. 1876



The paleontologists' flare for public slander had damaged both of their reputations. Cope was unable to find a bidder who could afford his entire fossil collection, which he had spent over 20 years developing. Finally, a fellow at the American Museum of Natural History bid $32,000 for part of the collection. In 1897, Cope became ill and died at 56.


American Museum of Natural History
Cope in his office shortly before his death


In 1899, at the age of 67, Marsh died of pneumonia with just $186 in his bank account. Over 80 tons of Marsh's personal collection of fossils was acquired by the Smithsonian, but Marsh left the bulk of his collection to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale.




Yale Peabody Museum
O.C. Marsh

While the feud between Cope and Marsh consumed the scientists' lives and damaged their careers, the amount and quality of bones they each collected became the foundation of paleontology in America. Cope left behind 13,000 specimens, and Marsh's comparable collection proved to be "the best support of the theory of evolution," according to a personal letter from Charles Darwin himself.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience
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