DAY 3: Kathleen Zoehfeld, a Connecticut author who has written more than 60 science books for children, met Nate Murphy at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Denver in 2004, where Murphy had made a presentation on Leonardo, his prize dinosaur fossil. She was interested in the possibility of a book about Leonardo.

She was fascinated when Murphy told her that he was the grandson of Nelda Wright, a Harvard paleontologist, who had often taken him on digs and taught him what he knew about paleontology.

Zoehfeld visited Malta the following year, and as Murphy showed her around the field station, he told her more about his life. Most intriguing, Zoehfeld thought, was that Wright had supposedly introduced Murphy to Levi Sternberg, the son of Charles H. Sternberg, who had discovered the world's first mummified dinosaur decades earlier. Murphy told Zoehfeld that when he was a young boy, he dug for dinosaurs in Montana and Canada with Levi Sternberg.

Zoehfeld's storytelling instincts were aroused. How amazing that Murphy, himself the discoverer of the world's best dinosaur mummy, should have worked with the son of the man who found the first one. It seemed as if Murphy had been destined to find Leonardo.

'Dazzling yarns'

She and other people who knew Murphy had heard other stories - how Wright had taken him on digs at the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, where the artist Georgia O'Keefe occasionally lived. Zoehfeld said Murphy told her he had met the famous paleontologists Barnum Brown and Ned Colbert there, and that once he had played pinochle with O'Keefe.

"It was all very dazzling," she said.

Joe Iacuzzo, another associate of Murphy's, heard him tell the same stories one night during another Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, at a dinner attended by a group of paleontologists.

"There was a table full of scientists there who took it hook, line and sinker, as I did," Iacuzzo said.

Zoehfeld, tipped off by a colleague that Murphy might be lying, did a little research. She soon learned that Wright had never been married and that none of her relations were aware that she'd had any children.

Murphy also told Zoehfeld that Wright had died in 1978, which was why no one else in his family, including his son Matt, had ever met her. Wright's obituary said she died in 1992 in Rockport, Maine.

Tim Quarles, a friend of Murphy's who was still trying to sort out the mess surrounding a raptor fossil found near Malta, learned from Zoehfeld what she had discovered about Wright. Quarles had heard all the Nelda Wright stories himself and hardly knew what to think.

He asked himself, "What in the world is going on? Who is this guy?"

Pieces of the puzzle

Around the same time, Quarles was communicating with Iacuzzo. By 2003, Iacuzzo was the manager of the Leonardo Project, which was working with Murphy and others to have research done on the Malta dinosaur, and arranging to have Leonardo exhibited at a major museum.

Iacuzzo told Quarles the project was close to landing a contract with a museum and that he intended to use the Nelda Wright connection in marketing the exhibit. Quarles told him what he knew.

After confirming what Zoehfeld had learned about Wright, Iacuzzo and Quarles looked into other claims made by Murphy. Two of the most familiar - that he had once toured as a guitar player with Country Joe McDonald and had set at least one high school football passing record in California that stood until it was broken by John Elway - could not be verified.

In an e-mail to The Gazette, Joe McDonald said he had never heard of Nate Murphy. Neither had Mark Tennis, executive editor of Cal-Hi Sports, a man who has been described by the San Jose Mercury News as "the foremost authority on California high school sports."

When these and other claims began to be exposed, some of Murphy's friends took to calling him "the Mesozoic Munchhausen."

The move to Billings

After Murphy left Malta, he moved to Billings, where he is working to open a new Judith River Dinosaur Institute. He has paleo-outfitting digs planned for this summer near Grass Range - at $1,700 a person - and his Web site says the new "dino lab" he is building in Billings "promises to be much better" than the one he had in Malta.

His friends and former associates are still trying to sort through their feelings toward Murphy. Despite everything they'd learned about him, they couldn't help remembering the outgoing, enthusiastic Nate Murphy they'd once known, the charming amateur who could dig for dinosaur bones all day and tell great stories all night.

"I cannot pretend to understand Nate," said paleontologist Bob Bakker.

"I knew other people who had spun yarns about their upbringing," he said. "I just didn't suspect that Nate would spin yarns about specimens. I was pretty late in realizing that."

Even so, Bakker added, he'll never forget the "moments of sheer joy" he saw on Murphy's face as he was unearthing fossils or working with children on a dig.

The Hammonds, who were also taken with Murphy when they met him, were particularly upset to learn that he had been telling people for years that they were greedy and difficult to deal with, and that he should handle all communication with them.

"He kept telling the rest of us, 'The Hammonds are just after money, so I'll deal with them,'" said Sue Frary, director of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta. That was Murphy's ostensible reason for asking everyone not to mention the raptor found on the Hammond ranch.

"I can understand keeping it from the rest of the paleo community until you've done the science on it," Frary said. "But keeping it from the landowners? It had never occurred to me that he wouldn't be upfront with the landowners."

Michael Jorgensen, who wrote, directed and photographed "Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy," the documentary on Leonardo that aired on the Discovery Channel, remembers asking Murphy for the Hammonds' fax number. He had some filming to do on the ranch and wanted to fax them his insurance certificate.

Murphy told him the Hammonds "were a little backward" and didn't have a fax machine, and that it would be best if he, Murphy, delivered the certificate himself. Shortly after that, Jorgensen met the Hammonds in Malta. They seemed nice enough, and they told him they had a fax machine at the ranch.

Jorgensen knew something was wrong. Only in retrospect did he realize how significant it was when, during the Dino Days event in Malta, he filmed Murphy describing how he had found the Sid Vicious raptor up near Saco.

"It's a real tragedy that here's a guy who, whether he's a paleontologist or not, really knows his stuff. When it comes to dinosaurs and paleontology, he's really smart," Jorgensen said.

Quarles said he was embarrassed when he was interviewed by federal investigators. As an environmental consultant, Quarles reads maps and uses GPS equipment. When investigators started asking about various digs, Quarles assured them that Murphy, his friend, had always been very careful about staying on private land.

But when the investigators began going over some of the digs he'd been on with Murphy, Quarles' heart sank. He said he realized immediately that Murphy had taken him prospecting and digging on federal land on "multiple" occasions.

"I told the state guy, 'You must think I'm so stupid that I can't read a map,' but it never occurred to me that I had to."

'Stung pretty bad'

JoAnn Hammond said she and her husband felt the same kind of embarrassment.

Murphy "had 'Boneman' on his license plate," she said. "We should have had 'Bonehead.'"

She also said that she and her husband will donate all the bones taken from their ranch to the Judith River Foundation. Even if they wanted to keep them, she said, they don't know any longer whether some of them might have been collected illegally on federal land on which they have grazing rights.

Many of Murphy's former associates said he took advantage of the trusting relationships and informal agreements that most people in rural Montana are accustomed to.

"We've done a lot of handshake agreements in this place and they've worked pretty good," said Anne Boothe, a member of the Judith River Foundation board. "But we've also been stung pretty bad."

Boothe and other former associates said nothing will erase the fact that Murphy made some amazing finds, and in many ways put Malta on the map. Boothe works in economic development and joined the foundation to promote Malta, not because she had any particular interest in dinosaurs.

"I have to say, none of this would have happened without his energy and his passion," she said.

Bakker said what happened to Murphy will not matter in the long run. The importance of his discoveries, especially of Leonardo, is what will endure.

When he first met Murphy, Bakker said, "there were already folks bad-mouthing Nate and his operation and his specimens. But the specimen was better than any report I had heard."

"It is extraordinary. Its extraordinariness has been vindicated by three scientific papers. That's what makes the whole yarn so tragic. Nate didn't have to fabricate anything. He had a unique and fabulous specimen."

"You can feel increasingly sorry for him, but then you get so angry," Frary said. "He will go down in history - but not the way he wanted to."