Photo courtesy of Jeffrey S. Hall Photography
By day, Upper Arlington resident Dennis Concilla is a lawyer with Carlile, Patchen & Murphy LLP.
Head of the firm’s Securities Litigation and Regulation Practice Group, Concilla has been with the company for 32 years. Concilla has a wife of 35 years, Peggy, and two children, Elizabeth and Stephen. He likes to fly fish on Lake Erie and cook.
Oh, and he also likes to dig up dinosaur fossils.
Fossil hunting is something Concilla has been interested in since childhood. The 65-year-old Upper Arlington resident began hunting for fossils when he was about 6 years old, which he says is a byproduct of being the youngest of four boys.
“As each of my brothers grew out of it, I inherited their collections,” Concilla says. “So it just developed into kind of a passion.”
Concilla grew up in North East, Pa., a town coincidentally located in the northwest corner of the state. He grew up fossil hunting all over his hometown and Canada, and now travels all over the U.S. doing it. He recalls three years ago, when he visited southern Wyoming to dig near a river formation for fossils of fish and various other creatures.
“I found 40 or 50 of them,” Concilla says. “My house looks a little like a natural history museum, much to my wife’s dismay.”
Photo courtesy of Jeffrey S. Hall Photography
However, Peggy is more than supportive of her husband’s unique passion. About 30 years ago, Peggy compiled a book for her husband detailing various spots around the U.S. in which dinosaur fossils are found. Life got in the way, and the Concillas were busy raising their two children, too busy for Concilla to head out on a solo trip for a dinosaur dig.
Peggy decided that, now that the couple are empty-nesters, there was no better time for Concilla’s Christmas gift. Concilla didn’t want a glitzy tourist trip, though; he wanted something authentic and worthwhile. After some research, Peggy hit the jackpot.
“I had no idea what I was getting into; part of me thought I was going to be in air-conditioned cars and trucks, and working under a tent with a wet bar and a Porta John,” says Concilla. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Last August, Concilla was dropped into the badlands of South Dakota and Montana. Each day, he began a trek across rugged terrain with 20 pounds of equipment on his back, looking for hot spots for dinosaur fossils.
“I was convinced my wife was actually trying to kill me, because it was grueling,” Concilla says. “I think the adrenaline kept me going.”
Photo courtesy of Dennis Concilla
On the final week of the dinosaur dig season, Concilla and other volunteers in his group uncovered a fossilized triceratops.
Concilla and his fellow volunteers – including lawyers, doctors and retired teachers – were accompanied by the real deal. Tyler Lyson, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Denver Museum of Natural Science, and paleontologist Antoine Bercovici of the Smithsonian Institution helped the group locate and dig for the fossils for a week.
“We identified 14 different sites where there were enough parts of dinosaurs that it’s worth going back to look and see whether there’s anything there,” says Concilla. “We get an amazing experience, they get free labor.”
Concilla says what kept him going during the exhausting hike around the badlands was the anticipation of finding bones millions of years old. And though tripping over a perfectly preserved tyrannosaurus rex skull isn’t likely, finding fragments of dinosaur bones is far from rare.
“You can’t walk 10 feet without finding a piece of something; it might just be a chip of a bone the size of a quarter,” Concilla says.
The frequency of finds didn’t lessen the excitement.
Photo courtesy of Dennis Concilla
The skull can be seen here in its full length, with its snout facing to the left and the 'frill," or crown-like section of the skull, behind Concilla.
“Everybody loves dinosaurs,” says Concilla. “It’s the excitement of discovery, it’s the ability to participate in real science.”
In fact, Concilla’s trip was during the final dig week of the summer before scientists packed up for the colder months, and Concilla’s most exciting find was nothing short of amazing: a fossilized triceratops. Because it was the final week of the digging season, the group covered the fossil back up and the scientists made a note of where to go back in summer 2017 to uncover the dinosaur.
Concilla says he definitely does not plan for his first dig to be his last, and he has been mulling over when he wants to go this summer.
“If I go early in the dig season, I’ll be working on that triceratops,” Concilla says. “If I go later, I’ll be doing more of what I did this time, which is actually looking for new sites, new fossils, trying to discover what’s still out there.”
And this time, Concilla says, Peggy wants to come to assist in doing work around the camp, such as cooking.
Despite Concilla’s excitement surrounding the dinosaur dig, he doesn’t plan to move out to the badlands and go full-time. In fact, he and Peggy have no interest in leaving central Ohio; he can take a plane to wherever he may want to dig.
“I came here in ’73, then went to law school and stayed on at the attorney general’s office, and we made it our home,” he says. “I love it. It’s a wonderful place to raise a family.”
Amanda DePerro is an assistant editor. Feedback welcome at hbealer@cityscenecolumbus.com.
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