Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world
Speaker 1: is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an
Speaker 1: open book, all of these amazing tales are right there
Speaker 1: on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. When we think of paleontology, we
Speaker 1: think of dusty faced scientists crouching over a gaping hole
Speaker 1: in the dirt. We think of sunlight gently illuminating a
Speaker 1: creature that has not been seen in millions of years.
Speaker 1: What we don't think about is crime. Real science is
Speaker 1: not like the movies. You don't find any clone dinosaurs
Speaker 1: wreaking havoc across an island theme park in our day.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean an area like paleont apology is
Speaker 1: free from controversy. Eric Procopy should know. He was one
Speaker 1: of the field's most controversial figures to date. He started
Speaker 1: collecting fossils and animal remains from a young age, diving
Speaker 1: for shark teeth in Florida when he was only ten
Speaker 1: years old. His parents, however, quickly grew tired of his
Speaker 1: hobby for one thing. They were running out of room
Speaker 1: to store it all. They told him that if he
Speaker 1: wanted to keep anything, he had to start unloading some
Speaker 1: of his collection. Procopy turned to auction houses and the Internet,
Speaker 1: where he would sell fossils to the highest bidder. Then
Speaker 1: he would funnel that money into acquiring and re selling
Speaker 1: bigger and better items. By two thousand twelve, Procopy had
Speaker 1: graduated from shark teeth all the way up to dinosaur skeletons.
Speaker 1: One such item had come into the fossil hunter's hands,
Speaker 1: and he was looking for a buyer. It was a
Speaker 1: skeleton belonging to the Tyrannosaurus batar, a relative of the
Speaker 1: Tyrannosaurus rex that had lived in Mongolia millions of years ago.
Speaker 1: It was a part of the world that had been
Speaker 1: a hotbed of paleontological activity since famous scientist Roy Chabin
Speaker 1: Andrews first discovered fossils in the region during the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: Procopy brought the skeleton from Mongolia into Great Britain before
Speaker 1: having its shipped to the United States. However, he declared
Speaker 1: it on US customs forms as having originated in the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom, not Mongolia. Once it landed in America, it
Speaker 1: didn't take long for a buyer to emerge, and Procopy
Speaker 1: set up a sail for the dinosaur's bones in New York.
Speaker 1: It seemed everything was going fine until Mongolian officials got
Speaker 1: the word of the impending sail. They stepped in and
Speaker 1: filed the restraining order, putting a halt to the transaction.
Speaker 1: According to their records, Procopy had not come to the
Speaker 1: possession of the Tyrannosaurus skeleton legally. It had been stolen.
Speaker 1: The constitution of Mongolia stated that any dinosaur fossil found
Speaker 1: within the country's borders were automatically deemed culturally significant and
Speaker 1: must be authorized by removal by the governments. Procopy had
Speaker 1: never sought government approval. Instead, he had just smuggled the skeleton,
Speaker 1: not of the entreat with the goal of a major payout.
Speaker 1: Dr Bolarmngin, a Mongolian paleontologist, was the person who had
Speaker 1: recognized the skeleton as having belonged to her home country
Speaker 1: and not to the United Kingdom as had been previously stated.
Speaker 1: Procopy claimed that it was impossible to know where the
Speaker 1: specimen had come from exactly, as the same species of
Speaker 1: dinosaur had also been discovered in China. His protests didn't
Speaker 1: matter in the end, though, and he was arrested in
Speaker 1: October of two thousand twelve for smuggling the Trantosaurus patar skeleton,
Speaker 1: as well as two others without prior authorization. Procopy was
Speaker 1: known to have an eclectic list of clients. These included
Speaker 1: celebrities and high powered lawyers who paid top dollar for
Speaker 1: rare fossils, which they would put on display in their
Speaker 1: homes and businesses. In fact, a Tyrannosaurus batar skull was
Speaker 1: sold back in two thousand seven to someone who even
Speaker 1: beat out Leonardo DiCaprio for the privilege of owning it.
Speaker 1: Though Procopy was not believed to have participated in the sale,
Speaker 1: the gallery it was purchased from had bought items from
Speaker 1: him in the past, and the owner of such a
Speaker 1: special item it was none other than actor Nicolas Cage,
Speaker 1: who had started to hit films about a famous treasure hunter.
Speaker 1: He didn't know the skull was stolen at the time.
Speaker 1: Homeland Security explained the story behind its provenance, and the
Speaker 1: actor agreed to relinquish it back to Mongolia where it belonged.
Speaker 1: The skull was so much more than a collector's item
Speaker 1: or a piece of home decor. It had been an
Speaker 1: important part of Mongolia's past, and like nicholas Cage to America,
Speaker 1: it was truly a national treasure. Every living thing has
Speaker 1: a story to tell us. It's life is comprised of
Speaker 1: joy and sorrow, success and failure. However, the stories don't
Speaker 1: end when a thing dies. For one particular creature, there's
Speaker 1: still quite a lot to say Moby Dick Herman Melville's
Speaker 1: epic tale of Revenge starts in the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: The narrator, Ishmael, goes there to join a whaling vessel
Speaker 1: seeking adventure. From there, he befriends the South Pacific chieftain,
Speaker 1: who accompanies him on his journey aboard the Pequad, which
Speaker 1: is led by the one legged captain Ahab. Melville's novel
Speaker 1: eventually solidified the author as one of the great American
Speaker 1: novelists of his day and illustrated New Bedford's importance to
Speaker 1: the whaling industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However,
Speaker 1: the Pennsylvania oil rush of eighteen fifty nine put whaling
Speaker 1: and New Bedford on notice. Petroleum was now a readily
Speaker 1: available resource and could be used to heat lamps, make candles,
Speaker 1: and do everything that whale oil had been doing for
Speaker 1: hundreds of years. The city pivoted to other industries to
Speaker 1: stay alive, including manufacturing and fishing, but whaling would still
Speaker 1: remain an important part of its history, So important, in fact,
Speaker 1: that in nineteen o three a journalist named Ellis L.
Speaker 1: Howland proposed a museum to be built to preserve the
Speaker 1: remains of New Bedford's past. Oil Magnate Henry Huddleson Rodgers agreed,
Speaker 1: and three years later he donated a bank building for
Speaker 1: such a purpose. In nineteen oh seven, the New Bedford
Speaker 1: Whaling Museum opened to the public, and over the next
Speaker 1: two decades it would grow in both size and number
Speaker 1: of exhibits on display. Tourists from all over came to visit,
Speaker 1: especially in nineteen thirty six, when the first of five
Speaker 1: complete whale skeletons made their debut. They called it Quasimodo,
Speaker 1: a fitting name for a humpback whale that had died
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty two. As time passed and the museum
Speaker 1: continued to increase its offerings, more skeletons found their way
Speaker 1: to New Bedford, including a thirty year old sperm whale
Speaker 1: measuring forty eight feet long, and a forty nine foot
Speaker 1: whale named Raina, as well as her unborn baby, and
Speaker 1: the biggest skeleton of the bunch, Cobo. Cobo, or King
Speaker 1: of the Blue Ocean, was a sixty six ft long
Speaker 1: blue whale that had been struck by a tanker in
Speaker 1: Blue whales were already endangered when the accident occurred, with
Speaker 1: roughly five hundreds still living in the North Atlantic. After
Speaker 1: it was struck and killed, the whales carcass was studied
Speaker 1: by various research facilities, with pieces of it being sent
Speaker 1: all over the globe for examination. As part of Cobo's necropsy,
Speaker 1: it was discovered that he had been involved in another accident,
Speaker 1: one that had broken his jaw and left a deep
Speaker 1: gash in the bone. The skeleton that remained was given
Speaker 1: to the new Bedford Whaling Museum, which carried out a
Speaker 1: thorough cleaning process to get it ready for display. Experts
Speaker 1: separated it and placed the various bone pieces into twenty
Speaker 1: two separate cages. These cages were then submerged into the
Speaker 1: harbor to let fish and other creatures nibble away at
Speaker 1: the remaining flesh. Saving Museum volunteers from the hassle. The
Speaker 1: cages were then removed from the water five months later,
Speaker 1: and the skeleton was brought to the museum's courtyard to
Speaker 1: lay under the cleansing light of the sun. It took
Speaker 1: a while, but the bones eventually dried out, and Museum
Speaker 1: of Ashal started assembling the skeleton for display. Unfortunately, they
Speaker 1: had another problem on their hands, whale oil. Whales had
Speaker 1: been harvested all those years ago for a reason. They
Speaker 1: produced a lot of oil, and Cobo was no exception.
Speaker 1: His bones were so coated in oil they had yellowed
Speaker 1: and started to smell. To counteract the oil's effects, the
Speaker 1: skeleton was treated with the solution normally used to cure leather,
Speaker 1: and it worked. The bones lost both their yellow color
Speaker 1: and their odor, and were soon hung in the museum's lobby.
Speaker 1: Cobo now greeted visitors from high above the front doors,
Speaker 1: but people are worn to keep an eye out because
Speaker 1: although he's been dead for the last twenty years and
Speaker 1: is now nothing but a skeleton, Cobo's remains still produce oil,
Speaker 1: which drips from his bones onto a platform below. Seeing
Speaker 1: the educational value in the oil, the museum gathers it
Speaker 1: into a Beaker to teach people about whale oil and
Speaker 1: its many properties, while Cobo just sort of hangs around.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
Speaker 1: and you can learn all about it over at the
Speaker 1: World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,