The 159th skeleton to come across Barry James’s desk was potentially one of the largest triceratops ever found. A colleague, Craig Pfister, had telephoned James, a commercial paleontologist, from Wyoming to discuss the astounding collection of bones, possibly worth as much as $25 million.

Would James come out of retirement to reconstruct it?

The discovery fueled James and his wife, April, his business partner and soul mate for 37 years. For months, in what James described as “dino mania,” the couple undertook the painstaking work that had earned them a solid reputation in the fossil industry, where they were known as experts in the preparation of skeletons for sale to private collectors and museums.

As a team, they combined his meticulous scientific approach to fossil restoration with her artistic touch. Fossils were glued together and mounted on metal structures to conjure, for example, the terrifying might of a T. rex or the elongated neck of a sauropod.

Now, amid what was perhaps the couple’s most ambitious project, April noticed a sharp pain in her lower back. The doctors said she was really sick, gall bladder issues. James said he and his wife persevered by focusing on what might be their last great collaboration.

As her husband gently airbrushed dirt from triceratops vertebrae like a dental hygienist removing plaque, she wrote poetry about dinosaurs and produced an illustrated children’s book about the triceratops, which she nicknamed Buddy.

Before she met James, April had held an eclectic assortment of jobs — raceway trophy girl, sandwich shop owner and the impresario of a fiberglass business that outfitted racing boats and skateboards. With James, she had committed to recreating prehistory, though now she was too sick to help with the bones as in years past.

Completing a dinosaur skeleton can take years, and April would not live to see the triceratops in full form. She died on Feb. 7, 2024, before James could even piece together the dinosaur’s facial bones and trademark frill.

Those who attended the memorial service were handed a copy of one of April’s poems, “The Goodbye.”

“Grief consumes us absolutely like wildfires exhaust tinder,” she wrote. “We feel the air sucked away from our souls as yet another small miracle embarks on the perpetually cryptic pilgrimage. Again, we do not fully understand. But love still makes perfect sense.”

During bereavement, James stopped working on the triceratops. It would be difficult to continue until his grief subsided. But surrounded by the bones one day, an idea started to form — an unconventional way for him to honor April’s memory.

The Dinosaur Whisperer

Nearly a year later, I arranged to meet Barry at his workshop in Pennsylvania, a renovated dairy barn. It was a chilly day in March and the wind roared through the wooden panels of the workshop, where Barry had hung pterodactyl bones and John Lennon quotes. The adjoining house was hidden on a hillside surrounded by forests and guarded by a pet graveyard dotted with scrap-metal sculptures that April had assembled to memorialize some 50 pets.

Friends had gathered that day to support Barry — and to reminisce about his wife.

“She had this creativity,” Dianne Fantaskey, one of April’s closest friends, said in an interview that day. “She would be up until 3 or 4 in the morning writing notes and poetry. She was very prolific.”

“They were a definite team,” added Fantaskey, who said the couple never took a vacation even as April’s physical pain increased over the years. “I really believe she sort of sacrificed herself for him and his business.”

Before we could talk about the dinosaur, James gave a house tour that started with a picture of his wife conversing with Yoko Ono. “They constantly exchanged poems back and forth,” he said.

Down the hallway was a door that hadn’t been opened in months. It was April’s art studio, filled with drawings that she had started but never completed and a library of papers that contained her writing. For once, Barry was speechless, allowing Pookie, his dog, to inspect the room before ushering her out.

Then we climbed the stairs to a secret room hidden behind a bookshelf, where the couple stored a collection of historical artifacts sourced from flea markets and auction houses. The hoard included a musket from the Revolutionary War, an old Viking knife and a 1923 telephone from the United States Capitol Building.

“We were going to put a museum up here,” James said, explaining that he wanted to mix the historical objects and fossil replicas to educate students. But he said the town balked.

James shrugged and continued down the hallway to his workshop. The door opened to the jet-black frill of the triceratops skull, recently completed. Apprentices had helped to fill the few gaps between its bones with chicken wire, modeling clay and plaster — helping to reassemble the fossil as April once did. The skeleton and its hundreds of teeth were glued together using an adhesive similar to the kind used with model planes.

James has always taken a careful approach to restoring fossils, but he wanted to ensure this specimen — all 9 feet and 7 inches of Buddy — would have an unimpeachable record of repair. “You can have all the bones you want, but what’s the point if you can’t put it together right?” James said. “It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, only it’s about 10,000 pieces.”

“It feels never-ending,” said Natalie Hayes, a college student who helped patch a section near the triceratops’ eye socket. “You take a clay and hardening resin, and you mix them together so it’s the same color as the bone. Then you put it in and texturize it as best as you can.”

James saw little need for patchwork on the triceratops. The skull was over 95 percent complete when accounting for the number of bones present. But the dinosaur’s torso and tail had still not been installed. Dozens of those bones were arranged on tables, cradled in the tinfoil and plaster jackets that had arrived from Wyoming for safekeeping.

The paleontologist promised he would eventually piece it all together. For now, April was on his mind.

The Red-Haired Hippie

Their first date in 1987 had been more like a boardroom meeting than a meet cute. He had spotted a classified ad in the back pages of a small magazine. “All I want for Christmas is a sensitive, intelligent, witty man.” The poster, April, was also the magazine’s publisher and someone who spoke of herself as a spiritualist and animal rights activist.

James was working at a car dealership in California while trying to figure out how to turn his paleontology degree into a company that excavated and sold dinosaurs. His last major discovery, of mammoth bones in a Death Valley lake, was now several years removed.

At lunch, April arrived in style — glittery, purple eye shadow, a bushy ginger hairdo and stilettos under a pencil skirt — and they brainstormed how to turn his business concept, Prehistoric Journeys, into a reality. On the second date, she arrived with a full business plan to finance expeditions by bringing tourists along for the ride, educating them on the prehistoric world through fossil digs.

Three years later, already business partners, they became life partners — married after a devastating fire had turned most of their belongings in Santa Barbara into ash. It was an ominous beginning, but the couple still managed that year to unveil their first project together, a triceratops skull that attracted prospective buyers from around the world. They eventually moved with April’s daughter from a previous relationship to the Pennsylvania barn where they had so much room to work.

“One evening, we commented to each other that we couldn’t remember when we had ever — either before or since getting together — felt so positive and fulfilled as we did at this point,” April later wrote.

Her relationship with Barry had allowed her to blossom as an artist. Her studio was now filled with her writing and with photographs of the natural beauty that surrounded her farm. She had even begun to write a screenplay about their journey in the fossil business.

One other key to their happiness: a clean division of labor. April handled logistics, marketing and accounting, freeing her husband to focus on the excavations and preparatory work needed to sell a dinosaur.

Finding a Bone to Pick

When the couple started their business in the late 1980s, the “Jurassic Park” films had yet to turn dinosaurs into full-blown celebrities. James was a talent scout in leather breeches, roaming the boneyards of the Hell Creek Formation in Montana and adjoining states, searching for the prehistoric version of a triple threat: rare pathology, a near-complete skeleton and a good back story on the discovery.

As it became clear that billionaires would spend upward of $30 million on a single specimen, the industry became more competitive.

“A simple dinosaur bone in 2000 was selling for $3,000 — cleaned and mounted,” James said. “Now it’s $25,000 to $35,000. I think what has happened is that a lot of wealthy people realized they could have a triceratops skull in their living rooms.”

Over time, James decided to switch completely to a less glamorous part of the business — the precise reconstruction of beasts that walked the earth 60 million years ago. His training was increasingly valuable in an industry that relies on the accuracy of scientific reports on the completeness and pathology of specimens.

“What makes anyone trustworthy?” said Pfister, the businessman who gave James the triceratops to assemble. “It’s if they actually do what they say they’re going to do. I trust Barry to do the honest thing and represent what he has.”

Not that there haven’t been some scrapes. Competition for the limited supply of skeletons in the Hell Creek Formation has led to some friction between states that want to protect their natural heritage and commercial paleontologists who would like to sell it.

In 2001, officials in Utah charged James with selling an Allosaurus specimen that the government claimed had been illegally removed from public land in 1992. He faced a potential sentence of nearly 15 years in prison.

James said he had been assured that the fossil was unearthed on private land. But he accepted a plea bargain in 2002 for a felony count of theft by receiving, which was later reduced to a misdemeanor, and he paid $50,000 in fines.

James filed for bankruptcy after this legal battle only to become embroiled in another dispute concerning the excavation of Tinker, a T. rex, found in South Dakota. The fossil hunters who hired him to construct the skeleton were sued by the local county in a dispute over the lease for the land. The case was ultimately resolved years later in the fossil hunters’ favor, but the impact of yet another legal entanglement had taken its toll by then.

The couple was living off credit cards and eyeing a potential sale of their home. April had developed insomnia and chronic pain. “I became a regular patient at the emergency room of the local hospital,” April wrote in a 2012 book about her life. “Both the doctors and the attorneys were pretty sure I was on the brink of a total physical and nervous breakdown.”

The couple rebounded, in part by exposing their expertise to a wider world. In 2008, James packed the remains of an Apatosaurus named Einstein into 10 cargo crates to the Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi, where handlers reassembled the bones into a skeleton that greeted visitors to the city. And in 2014, the couple invited more than 250 students to watch a T. rex named Tristan Otto have a CT scan at Sunbury Community Hospital in Pennsylvania to determine why it had died.

James said that the legal battles had stung, but that his New York upbringing had toughened him up. “The only thing that bothered me was that it upset April.”

But April showed resilience, too. “We have risked everything on several occasions to build and rebuild this oddball paleo business,” she wrote. “The prize has been our ability to move through an unpredictable world while doing something that is thrilling.”

No Partner, Just Tons of Work

By the time a doctor fully examined April in January 2024, it was too late. Her gallbladder had ruptured, flooding her body with a toxic bile that slowly caused organ failure.

When she died a month later, James was distraught. He was a 74-year-old hippie in a cowboy hat, ambling through the workshop filled with hundreds of triceratops bones awaiting treatment.

That is when inspiration hit. His grief might subside if he could rename the triceratops after his dead wife. (Barry already had a dinosaur named after himself, a Camptosaurus.) He called up the dinosaur’s owner, Pfister, and said it was a nonnegotiable part of the deal in which James is to receive roughly half of the proceeds.

“That’s the one thing,” James said. “No matter what museum and no matter what price, even if a collector is offering $100 million to name it after his son or daughter, I am not selling. I want this triceratops to remain named April.”

James said he already had collectors in places like Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi willing to spend $25 million on the dinosaur. But he was concerned that he will not be able to legally enforce his desire to retain April’s name in perpetuity.

Pfister, who brought the dinosaur to James, said naming rights were not likely to be a condition of sale, though he could understood his business partner’s anguish.

“Barry is a good man. He is trustworthy and passionate,” Pfister said. “But whoever purchases this dinosaur will probably rename it to whatever he wants. We are calling it April as a tribute to Barry’s wife, but you never expect someone to carry on that name.”

Though it’s been almost two years now, James denies he’s delaying the triceratops’ completion because it would mean saying goodbye again to April. But it is true, he acknowledged, that the dinosaur now serves, as April once did, as a compelling reason to get up in the morning.

“If I didn’t name it after April, I probably would have given up on it already,” he admitted. “Because it is so devastating not having her here. I’m 74 and we were together for 37 years. That’s almost half my lifetime.”

“Now I’m paying bills, which I have no clue how to do. I don’t know how to get on the computer,” he continued. “And when I hang up the phone, I’m left with all these pictures of her, which make me realize that life wasn’t possible without her.”

In truth, he said, drawing me into his endeavor might help preserve her memory. “Once you have the article out there, I don’t think anyone will change her name,” James confided.

But he knows the day will come when April the Triceratops needs to leave the workshop, perhaps to stand on someone else’s property or in a museum. “The kids won’t care about April or Barry,” he said, cracking a smile. “They’ll just care if the dinosaur looks cool or scary.”