Butch And Brett Do Time Digging Bones In Penitentiary;
Mastodont Excavation Turns Up Human Skeleton

Butch, Brett and two other LSU grad students dig mastodont bones while, 20 feet above, archaeologists dig human bones at the Angola Prison, Louisiana. The guards seem to have forgotten where the real paleontology is.

Two intrepid paleontologists Carleton recently released into the wild, Butch and Brett Kessler Dooley '91 and '94, had barely returned from their honeymoon trip to the Rocky Mountain states in the summer of 1994 when they had to respond to a call placed to the paleontology museum of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It was a request for assistance in identifying some bones unearthed by prisoners digging fill from a hillside on the prison grounds. Butch was a graduate student with the LSU museum at that time.

As if it weren't bizarre enough to be excavating a mastodont skeleton under the continuous "protection" of prison guards (Brett and Butch had at least two armed guards watching them at all times), the episode turned even more weird when a human skeleton was discovered in the same outcrop about 20 feet above the mastodont. Brett and Butch capped the experience by submitting to an interview by two murderers for the prison inmates' magazine.

The whole thing began when inmates using a front end loader to remove fill dirt from a hillside uncovered the mastodont bones. "Prison officials immediately stopped the work and called LSU scientists [Butch, Brett and some other grad students under Butch's direction] to the site," declared the local newspaper.

Butch reported in a letter that "the mastodont was about 25% complete, buried in a Pleistocene loess deposit about 8,000 to 10,000 years old." Brett said they found a femur, pelvis, radius, ulna, humerus, tusk, teeth, skull parts, some ribs and a vertebra in the two weeks they dug. At the conclusion of the dig the fossil was transported back to the Paleontology museum at LSU to be prepared for analysis.

Unexpectedly during the dig, one of the graduate students found some human bones weathering out of the outcrop just above the area where the mastodont was found. "Prison officials immediately removed the earth moving equipment that had been tearing away at the hill," trumpeted the local newspaper. The paleontologists stabilized the human remains and turned the excavation of those bones over to a team of archaeologists from LSU.

Brett and Butch encase mastodont parts in plaster for removal.

The discovery of the human skeleton triggered rampant speculation, of course, but it turned out to be an adult woman, possibly a slave, buried in a casket (there were square nails associated with the bones). The presence of casket nails probably indicates a legal 19th century burial predating the existence of the prison, although the site is reported to be "only a stone's throw" from the prison's cemetery.

The prison guards developed their own theories about the provenance of the mastodont fossil, the human remains, and how they came to be associated with one another in the hillside. Sparing Newsletter readers the grisly details, the elaborate fantasies involved interactions between the "ephalant" and the person who was identified in ways that were less than politically correct. The guards reveled in testing their ideas on the stalwart paleontologists who were laboring to extract a more scientific explanation from the sediments.

Asked by a newspaper reporter if the human remains might be those of a long-forgotten inmate, Prison Warden John Whitley said simply, "All I know is that my prisoner count is clear."