SEQUIM — Don Bradley takes a common childhood fascination to impressive heights — and weights.
A peek inside his shop west of Sequim reveals his unusual hobby: collecting dinosaur bones — a cruel-looking arm of the meat-eating Acrocanthosaurus, a massive leg from vegetarian Camarasaurus — and mounting them on handsome pieces of wood.
Bradley is both scientist and artist.
He’s director of the Coastal Security Institute at Battelle’s laboratory on Sequim Bay, where his staff studies, among other things, ways to detect national security threats unleashed in coastal waters.
And when he goes home at night, Bradley works with 200-pound pieces of bone as well as fragile fossil slices. He reads voraciously about the creatures that left them behind.
Bradley first became interested in dinosaurs as a boy growing up in Spokane. And though he never lost that interest, he set it aside while caught up in college, marriage, children and career.
Then, in the late 1990s, he started collecting fossils and befriended J.B. Sanchez, a serious collector of dinosaur bones in Colorado.
Sanchez died 12 years ago. Since then, his family has managed his estate, and Bradley has been slowly purchasing pieces from his collection.
Now Bradley, 61, is deep into an art form not seen in many places in the world. He calls it “Paleo Lithic Art,” which is also the name of his business.
He polishes and mounts spheres and slices of dinosaur bone that shimmer with agate, amethyst and opal deposits. And he has bronze castings made of scary-looking claws.
And on his Web site, www.dinosaur-gems.com, Bradley offers some of the pieces for sale.
They’re priced for others who are as passionate as the man who fashioned them, “from the low thousands to the tens of thousands.”
Bradley has sold a few and hopes to sell more to corporations or to individuals who want to make very big statements in their homes.
But money isn’t what motivates him.
Instead, he revels in learning about the magnificent reptiles that once stomped across the land, foraging for foliage or hunting for prey, depending on the species.
Dinosaurs were a diverse crowd, Bradley said, with lots of strange bodily features.
There was the Struthiomimus, an ostrich-like thing; the Camarasaurus with its long goose neck and spoon-shaped teeth; the Acrocanthosaurus, a predator with big spines.
For this collector, their allure comes from the fact that they dominated much of the planet for so long.
Dinosaurs were here for 150 million years — a time span that’s hard to get one’s human mind around.
We, in contrast, originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, Bradley noted.
“This would make the reign of the dinosaurs about 750 times longer.”
At first glance, a fossil may look like a boring chunk of rock, he acknowledged.
But, Bradley said, when you see the inside with its galaxy of minerals, or when you find out how these gigantic beings lived, a new, old world opens up.
The artist and collector in Bradley also relishes creating an offbeat work of art, a piece that’s one of a kind. He doesn’t stamp out duplicates.
Visiting Bradley’s shop full of fossils, one has to wonder: What did he think of the movie “Jurassic Park”?
“Oh, I loved it,” he said.
He doesn’t let it bug him that the film’s star, the Tyrannosaurus rex, didn’t live during the Jurassic period. T. rex was a beast of the Cretaceous period, of about 65 million to 145 million years ago.
These days, the dinosaurs’ true stories, told in the bones inside Bradley’s shop, continue to inspire him.
“It’s a slice of Earth’s history,” he said, “and a slice of an incredible life form.”
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