Arts|Their Last Love Token: A Dinosaur Rebuilt From Its Excavated Bones

The 159th skeleton to come across Barry James’s 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 $25 million.

Would James come out of retirement to reconstruct it?

The discovery fueled 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.

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.