Distinctly Montana Magazine

47 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m sils, including the recognition that the crea- tures they were seeing preserved in stone were the remains of an ancient ocean. An As- siniboine man named Bull's Dry Bones put it succinctly: "The whole surface of the earth was at a time covered with water." Native Americans also often called some mastodon and dinosaur skeletons "grandfather of the buffalo." Unlike the Greeks and Romans, who likewise discovered and attempted to grapple with the paleon- tological evidence left behind by dinosaurs and prehis- toric megafauna and decided they were the bones of mythologi- cal animals such as cyclops and centaurs, the Indigenous people of North America largely concluded that the strange bones they found belonged to ancient beasts that, while spiritual in nature, were ancestors of the animals they saw every day. One demonstration of the sophistication of the Indigenous people of the plains is that the Crow, who lived thousands of miles away from the American Southeast, had a word for "alligator." Whether the Crow knew about the alligator through indirect con- tact with peoples who had encountered one, or whether they had seen a fossilized alligator, it is remarkable to note that they had accurately preserved their knowledge of the creature they could never have seen alive, and given it a name. Adrienne Mayor has pointed out how the beliefs of the Indig- enous people of the American high plains and mountain West anticipated some of the tenets of modern paleontology: that these bones were very old, that they represent a species that has since vanished, and that they may well be the antecedents, or "grandfathers" of the creatures we share the land with today. Native American fossil legends of the high plains are one of those places where science and cultural narratives intersect. Thunder Beasts and Water Beasts were both spiritual beings im- portant to Native cosmology and were, after all, real. There were great winged monsters that wheeled around the clouds among arcing gouts of lightning. Huge creatures did once swim in Montana's seas, hunting prey and eluding pred- ators in shoals that are now badlands. Bison did have grandfa- thers; the great Bison latifrons stood eight feet high and over fif- teen feet long as it ruminated on prairie grass some 20,000 years ago. And millions of years even before that, distinctly bison-like ceratopsid dinosaurs roamed the same lands as would their met- aphorical great-grandchildren, and the first people who would rely on them for food. Like the contents of a medicine bundle, the Native Americans of Montana safeguarded their knowledge, curiosity, and stories, passing them down and preserving them from generation to gen- eration. The scientific process more or less aims to do the same. It makes you wonder what marvels remain to be discovered, or rediscovered, on the frontier where human culture and scientific inquiry meet?

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