BILL PARKER HUNTS TREASURE — BOTH FOSSILS AND ANTIQUES! Inside an NPS Worker’s Retirement Plan
“Being a paleontologist in the Petrified Forest is a great job because there are just so many fossils!” Bill says.
Bill considers himself a treasure hunter both at work and after hours. He’s still in the thick of his career with the National Park Service, but he’s already thinking about how he’ll keep
Way back in 2004, Bill Parker and his team of paleontologists at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona discovered something exciting: 14 skeletons of a mysterious animal unearthed in the Painted Desert. At first glance, the creatures appeared to be part dinosaur and part ancient crocodile. They had distinctive leaf-shaped teeth (Google “iguana teeth” to see for yourself) that matched records of early plant-eating dinosaurs. But they also had bony skin plates and crocodile-like ankles. The skeletons dated back to the Triassic Period — 220 million years ago — but the mixed signals were confusing. The team originally assumed they’d found the bones of two different animals jumbled together. “But then, we found a jaw of the crocodile-like animal with the plant- eating dinosaur teeth IN IT! So, we realized that it was all one animal and these things weren’t dinosaurs at all, they were early crocodilians [called Revueltosaurus],” Bill says. This realization might not seem like a big deal to you, but it dropped the jaws of paleontologists around the world! Suddenly, they realized there weren’t plant-eating dinosaurs in North America and Europe 220 million years ago after all — just Revueltosauruses.
busy in retirement. He plans to double down on his hobby of finding hidden gems among the worthless junk at garage sales, estates sales, and storage unit auctions. “I started doing it three or four years ago to make a little bit of extra money,” he explains. “I go around and find things I think are interesting — usually vintage and historic items — then I research them, fix them up, and resell them for a profit. The main draw for me is the treasure hunt of what I can find and learning about the history of the item itself.” Bill has salvaged vintage cameras, autographed photos, and dozens of collectibles. Once, he discovered a beautifully carved and painted wooden bird in a storage shed. “I looked it up, and it’s something called a Takahashi Bird. Further research revealed when a Japanese couple was in an internment camp during World War II, to pass the time and make extra money, the husband would carve these birds out of wood and the wife would paint them,” Bill said. Bill says anyone can learn to spot similar treasures and save them from the landfill. Just shop the resale market and look for interesting, old, and unique items.
This created a mystery: Where are the ancestors of the plant-eating dinosaurs we know and love, like the Triceratops and Stegosaurus? The folks at the Petrified Forest National Park are still trying to find out. Bill, who is now the resource program manager for the park’s Natural Resources and
“You can even use Google Lens if you have the Google App,” he says. “Take a picture of the item and Google will tell you what it is.”
Want to try it yourself? Visit Lens.Google.com, then head to your local thrift store to get started.
Cultural Resources Program, says the park is a hotbed of fascinating fossils.
Here’s to wishing you and Bill a successful treasure hunt.
“We have some of the earliest dinosaurs, which means we have some of the earliest birds, some of the earliest mammals, and some of the earliest reptiles,” Bill explains. “The potential to find species new to science is really high here, and we also get a lot of weird animals that went extinct at various times.” Visitors can check out an exhibit on the Revueltosaurus, watch paleontologists chisel out fossils, and even hike through an entire grove of petrified trees — the largest deposit of petrified wood in the world.
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