In the Press — Newspaper Coverage of the Wyoming Digs, 1994–2007
The 2007 Camarasaurus excavation at Shell, Wyoming was covered by newspapers in six states — Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, California, Florida, and Virginia — through Ruffin Prevost’s reporting for the Billings Gazette, its pickup on the Lee Newspapers and Associated Press wires, and original hometown features on both coasts.
This page is the citation record. The clippings themselves are held in the archive; the newspapers own that material, so what appears here is the citation, the reporter, and — where the words are my own — what I actually said at the quarry.
2007 — The Camarasaurus at Shell, Wyoming
Billings Gazette (Montana) — front page, July 10, 2007
“A Dinosaur Dream Team” — by Ruffin Prevost, Gazette Wyoming Bureau. The Wyoming Edition front page, with the crew photographed in the quarry and all six volunteers named in the caption.
“I’ve never seen one like this. It’s pretty spectacular.”
That was my answer when Prevost asked what made this specimen different. The story ran under a second headline — “Thanks to hard work by volunteers, pristine skeleton gets unearthed quickly” — and noted that a fifteen-ton animal had come out of the ground in about a month. Terry Pfister described the classic “death pose”; I described the diggers as Bob Simon’s paleo-slaves, which Prevost printed.
Santa Cruz Sentinel (California) — front page, July 9, 2007
“DINOSAUR HUNTER — Soquel man spends summers dabbling in paleontology” — by Genevieve Bookwalter. The hometown front page, filed while the quarry was still open.
Greybull Standard (Wyoming) — front page, July 12, 2007
“Unearthing another dinosaur treasure” — by Nathan Oster. The Big Horn Basin’s own paper, and the account in which Bob Simon went on the record about how the 2004 Stegosaurus got her name.
Casper Star-Tribune (Wyoming) — July 16, 2007
“A dino-myte discovery — Volunteers help unearth ‘photogenic’ specimen.” Wyoming-section front, continuing inside.
The Montana Standard, Butte — July 17, 2007
“Dig uncovers skeleton of 15-ton dinosaur” — the Lee Newspapers wire version of Prevost’s story.
Rapid City Journal (South Dakota) — July 18, 2007
“15-ton dinosaur skeleton found” — wire pickup, carrying the story into the Black Hills.
Great Falls Tribune (Montana) — July 24, 2007
The Associated Press version of the same reporting, running in north-central Montana.
The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg (Virginia) — July 31, 2007
“Spotsylvania man unearths another ‘find of a lifetime’” — by Laura Moyer. Not a wire pickup but an original feature in Bob Simon’s hometown paper, and the most detailed account of the Shell seasons in print. It records the 2004 excavation plainly:
“…he, Boscarelli, the Pfisters and a Swiss paleontological crew carefully unearthed a nearly complete stegosaurus they named Sarah.”
The same story describes Don Pfister and me chiselling siltstone and sandstone away from the Camarasaurus bones, and quotes Nick Fraser of the Virginia Museum of Natural History on the tension between commercial and academic collecting.
Independent Florida Alligator (Gainesville) — August 2, 2007
“Former student spends summer finding dinosaur fossils” — by Noel Sanchez. My old campus paper. The same issue’s Darts & Laurels column awarded a laurel to “former Gator Bob Boscarelli.”
2006 — The season before
Billings Gazette (Montana) — July 15, 2006
“Diggers pick Wyoming site for dino remains” — by Ruffin Prevost. The pre-Camarasaurus season at Shell.
1999 — Quoted nationally on Internet marketing
Before the digs, another chapter put my name in print across the country. Bob Weinstein’s “Tech Watch” careers column, distributed by King Features Syndicate, quoted me through the fall of 1999 as an Internet-marketing voice — identified in print as a Web developer and programmer/analyst at the American Electronics Association in Santa Clara, California, then finishing a master’s in e-commerce.
The column ran under different headlines in, among others, the Fresno Bee (Sept 26), the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and the San Francisco Examiner (Oct 3), the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Journal (Oct 10), the Boston Globe (Oct 17), the Tampa Tribune (Nov 14), and Newsday in three editions (Jan 23, 2000).
What I told Weinstein then still reads as reasonable advice:
“Volunteer your services to nonprofit organizations developing a Web presence… There is no better way to build a portfolio if you’re starting from scratch.”
1994 — Santa Cruz Sentinel, March 19
The Sentinel’s “Name-dropping” column, which opened: “Some people meet over the office water cooler. Dani Lee Reynolds and Robert Louis Boscarelli met over a printing machine.” The paper got one detail wrong — it made me a Florida State graduate. I am a Gator.
Researchers and journalists: the clippings behind every citation on this page are held in the archive, and I’m glad to help anyone verify a date, a byline, or a quote. Use the contact page.