DAY 1: This is the first of a four-part series examining the troubled history of Nate Murphy, who is awaiting sentencing on state and federal charges of theft stemming from his activities as an amateur paleontologist.

Just a few short years ago, Nate Murphy was sitting on top of the world.

The amateur paleontologist from Malta was credited with finding some of the most spectacular dinosaur fossils ever unearthed. One of them, Leonardo, discovered in 2000, had been written up in newspapers and magazines around the world, and the Discovery Channel was working on a documentary about the find.

Paleontologists and other scientists flocked to Malta to be a part of the research into the mummified dinosaur that still bore the imprint of its skin. This newspaper, too, extensively charted Murphy's adventures.

Murphy, a big, barrel-chested promoter who wore a straw hat and shorts no matter what the season, had made presentations about Leonardo at annual meetings of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, where he radiated enthusiasm.

His business of taking paying clients out on dinosaur digs was booming, and he could look forward to the eventual opening of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, which would house some of his many finds.

But in the summer of 2007, Murphy's world began falling apart.

That July, in the face of growing evidence that he had stolen a raptor fossil from a Malta-area ranch and lied about where he found it, Murphy resigned as director of the paleontology lab at the Dinosaur Field Station in Malta, which he helped establish five years earlier. He was also asked to resign from the Judith River Foundation, which had grown out of his work with dinosaurs, and to sign over his partial ownership rights to the fossils he and his associates had discovered.

The foundation didn't know it at the time, but the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation, the Bureau of Land Management and the FBI had opened investigations into Murphy's dinosaur-digging activities a month before his resignation.

Those investigations resulted in a state charge of felony theft for stealing the raptor fossil, valued at as much as $400,000, and a federal charge of theft of government property for removing fossils from federal land when Murphy had no permit. Murphy pleaded guilty to both charges this spring and is awaiting sentencing.

A man with a history

In mid-April, when Murphy entered a guilty plea to the federal charge, his attorney, Mike Moses of Billings, told the judge, "This is a man with a history of doing the right thing."

Many of Murphy's former associates, including scientists, assistants and members of the foundation board in Malta, tell a much different story. They have learned that he misled them for years, removing major specimens without notifying the affected landowners, profiting from the sale of fossils and fossil castings and consistently failing to record even the most rudimentary scientific data on many of the bones he helped unearth.

And as a strange sidelight to the sins of omission and commission related to his paleontology work, Murphy had also been fabricating details of his own history, they discovered.

Murphy and his attorney have turned down several interview requests, and all Murphy has said since he was charged with crimes is that he will eventually tell the whole story and how others have tried to ruin him.

Although some of Murphy's one-time colleagues expressed anger at his actions, most said they were merely bewildered. Whatever else he might have done, many of them said, he had an uncommon knack for finding dinosaur bones, and for being able to tell from the slightest of surface indications how fossil remains were situated underground.

Even Howie and JoAnn Hammond, on whose ranch most of Murphy's discoveries were made, and who were most obviously victimized by his crimes, said they respected all he did for the area.

"Malta would not have the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum or the fossils without the time and talents of Nate Murphy," JoAnn Hammond said.

Bob Bakker, a paleontologist who did much to formulate modern theories of dinosaur behavior and who has worked extensively with Murphy, said that for all the damage done by Murphy, he mostly hurt himself by squandering a wealth of innate talent.

"The monumental tragedy is, I don't think it was necessary financially or any other way for Nate to prevaricate and make things up," Bakker said.

David Trexler, a paleontologist at the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, near Choteau, was an early associate of Murphy and wrote the first scientific paper on Leonardo. When serious allegations of wrongdoing began to swirl around Murphy, Trexler said he ignored them, figuring Murphy "was being persecuted because he didn't have a degree and it was a personality thing."

"The more I learned, the less it seemed like that was the scenario," he said. "Later it was, 'Holy cow. I was misled for how many years?'"

Sue Frary, director of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, said Murphy "did this to himself, and that is what is so tragic."

"The truth would have got him everything he wanted and more."

Elvis, the first big find

Murphy, 51, has said he grew up in Southern California and Alaska. Though it is unclear how he acquired a working knowledge of field paleontology, he began talking with the Phillips County Museum about opening a dinosaur wing there soon after moving to Malta in 1992. Some of his early fossil prospecting in the area was done on his in-laws' ranch near Saco.

In 1993, Murphy founded the Judith River Dinosaur Institute, a private, for-profit, paleo-outfitting business that took paying clients out on digs, ostensibly on private ranches to which he had leased access. The Judith River formation is the sedimentary layer in Montana that bears fossils from the Cretaceous era, roughly 89 million to 65 million years ago.

Murphy made his first big discovery in 1994 - a duckbilled, plant-eating hadrosaur that was complete except for a short segment of the tail and which was fully articulated, meaning the bones were connected.

It was later determined that Elvis, as the fossilized creature was named, had been found on BLM land, and that Murphy did not have a permit to be there. No charges were filed against Murphy, and the dig site was turned over to the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. Elvis, still government property, is on loan to the Phillips County Museum.

Murphy had earlier applied for permission to explore for dinosaurs and excavate on federal lands in Montana, but his application was denied. The Gazette asked to see copies of Murphy's application and the resume he submitted with it, but the BLM said no, citing Murphy's privacy rights.

However, Christine Tincher, director of external affairs for the Montana/Dakotas BLM, did say the application "was denied based on the fact that we could not verify the information on his resume or his application."

Laurie Bryant, now retired, was the regional BLM paleontologist when Murphy filed the application. She said she couldn't go into specifics, either.

But when she first encountered Murphy, Bryant said, "Nate said he had a carpet cleaning business, and I'm not aware that he has any professional training, experience or education in paleontology. I would also say that the term 'paleontologist' is used pretty loosely by some people who think it's just about digging up fossils. We can't really learn much from fossils unless scientific data is collected with them and then analyzed by someone who knows what it means."

A ranch rich in bones

In 1998, Murphy received permission from Howie and JoAnn Hammond to prospect for fossils on their ranch. The Hammonds had bought the ranch, about 25 miles north of Malta, in 1979. It now encompasses 37,000 acres, about evenly split between land the Hammonds own outright and grazing land they lease from the BLM.

Murphy rightly divined that the Hammonds' place, much of it badlands gulches with lots of eroded slopes, was rich in dinosaur bones.

Howie Hammond said that Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, "was the first one who made us interested in it. He told us that if we found a fossil like Elvis, it might be worth a million dollars."

There was no contract between Murphy and the Hammonds at first, just a verbal agreement and a handshake.

"If he found anything significant - those were his exact words - he'd let us know about it," Hammond said.

At the time, the Hammonds said, they had no idea their ranch was as rich in fossils as it turned out to be, and it never occurred to them that Murphy would be removing anything from the ranch without their knowledge.

Coming Monday: Bones unearthed, deceit discovered