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City People

The bone man cometh

By MICHAEL A. MOHAMMED
Published March 9, 2007

Marvin Preston picks up a fragment of black rock the size of a child's fist. One side is smooth and curved, the other more jagged.

"It's from the shell of a giant armadillo," he said. "It was about the size of a Volkswagen."

Dipping his hand into the bucket of his latest finds, he examines a small, tan, dome-shaped stone.

A tortoise's foot spur, he says, for digging.

Preston, a director of the Tampa Bay Fossil Club, can glance at any fragment from among the thousands in his South Tampa home and tell what kind of creature it came from.

Some are fairly obvious, like a pair of claws from a Shasta sloth, an extinct cow-sized plant eater.

Others, like Preston's large collection of petrified ivory, look like simple shards of rock to the untrained eye. He holds one up to show a barely visible checkerboard pattern on its surface, the sole clue to its biological origin.

Preston, 75, grew up in Illinois and joined the Air Force at 17. His skill with machines landed him in a career fixing some of the most cutting-edge planes of the 20th century: the B-47, the first jet bomber; the B-58, the first supersonic bomber.

From 1964-1971 he served at Area 51, a top secret development facility for advanced aircraft in Roswell, N.M. There, Preston serviced the SR-71 Blackbird. Designed for reconnaissance and capable of triple the speed of sound, it's still the fastest manned airplane around.

"Course, satellites did 'em out of business," he said, referring to the expensive plane's retirement in favor of satellite reconnaissance.

Preston shrugged when asked about Area 51, Mecca for UFO conspiracy theorists.

"I still can't talk about it," he said.

For a guy who may have seen aliens and who spends his time hunting pieces of extinct animals, Preston is remarkably soft-spoken.

Mike Searle, president of the fossil club, said Preston's reserved demeanor hides a quirky mischief.

"It's a dry, offbeat humor that you wouldn't expect from an old guy sitting there being real quiet most of the time," he said.

In his 18 years with the club, Preston's engineering skills have come in handy. He helps build the lighting setup for the club's annual FossilFest, which takes place this weekend, and runs a "touch table" for visitors to handle and examine pieces from his collection.

Preston gets his fossils from spoil islands in Tampa Bay, places where dredging ships leave the muck scooped from shipping channels. With his decades of experience, he can spot a chip of petrified bone in a pile of muddy seashells.

Then he can usually identify the animal it came from.

Sometimes, Preston arranges his fossils in creatively kitschy ways. For a Christmas exhibition he made a "tree" out of pipes and hung fossils from its branches.

After collecting a pile of glyptodon shell pieces - the armor for an extinct, turtle-like mammal the size of a small car - Preston decided to decorate a painting of trees hanging on his wall.

He glued the ancient shards over the trees in the painting, making a knobbly forest.

After retiring from the Air Force, Preston spent a few years working on machinery in phosphate mines. Sometimes he had to wait for the equipment to shut down, so he made the best of it.

Preston encrusted a large wooden cutout of Florida with about 2,000 prehistoric shark teeth from the mines.

Oblong rocks cover one table in his house. They are mastodon teeth, he explains, identified by their parallel ridges. One is larger and stranger than the others, its shape warped and its ridges curved and wavy.

The deformed molar probably came from an animal with a broken jaw, making it an unusually rare find and Preston's favorite.

Age hasn't slowed him in his passion: He walks 16 miles a week throughout Tampa and takes his boat out fossil-hunting once a week.

Though many of his fossils are worth hundreds of dollars, Preston isn't planning to sell them anytime soon.

"I'm not ready to part with a lot of it just yet," he said.

Michael A. Mohammed can be reached at mmohammed @sptimes.com or 813 226-3404.

Fast Facts:

Marvin Preston

Age: 75

Number of children: 3

Favorite fossils: matching pair of Shasta sloth claws, deformed mastodon tooth, full upper set of fossilized horse teeth

Favorite airplane: SR-71 Blackbird

Volunteers: On board of directors for the Tampa Bay Fossil Club

Pastimes: Walking and, of course, boating and fossil digging.

If you go

The Tampa Bay Fossil Club's annual FossilFest, held from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, at the Florida State Fairgrounds Special Events Center. Admission $5, children 12 and under free. For more information visit www.tampabayfossilclub.com.

[Last modified March 8, 2007, 08:00:48]