The dinosaur hunter

Clayton Phipps is a third-generation cattleman with the strangest of side jobs, said Daniel Engber in Men’s Journal. When he’s not herding Black Angus cattle on his Montana ranch, he hunts for dinosaurs. The region near Phipps’s ranch is a rich dinosaur graveyard, thanks to its exposed Cretaceous rock—known as the Hell Creek Formation—and hunters have scoured the area ever since the first known Tyrannosaurus rex was excavated there in 1902. Dinosaur hunting is grueling work, especially in the winter, and Phipps, 40, spends months roaming the frozen land with nothing but a GPS unit and a shovel in the hopes of finding something to supplement his $25,000-a-year ranching salary. At one point, he was on the verge of giving up, he says. “But then I walked up the hill and found a big tooth”—a T. rex incisor worth $2,500—“and I was back in business.” Last year, he really hit the jackpot; he discovered the interlocked fossils of a tyrannosaurid and a horned ceratopsian apparently locked in combat when they died. He hopes to sell it for $7 million. But Phipps has already mentally moved on to his next conquest. “It’s the American dream,” he says. “In the back of your mind, you’re always looking for the next T. rex. Or the next fighting dinosaurs—I mean, you couldn’t dream that up.”

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