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SIERRA VISTA — Tom Kaye’s garage is his workshop. Pretty typical for your average retiree.
But in Kaye’s garage doesn’t sit an old classic car to restore, and in his basement, the tool drawers aren’t filled with wrenches, hammers or power drills.
Instead, Kaye is working on a telescope to put in the observatory he’ll begin building in September. His tool drawers hold small glass containers of prehistoric bones and spinal cords.
“People joke that I’m only into two things: Long ago and far away,” Kaye said.
  
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But if Kaye gives you a tour of his house and 19-acre property, you’ll soon realize it’s no joke.
Kaye is an associate researcher with the Burke Museum on the campus of the University of Washington. He doesn’t have a paying gig with the university, but he does help them find all sorts of fossils for their museum.
For three months during the summer, Kaye, 50, and his wife, Carol, 51, spend their time in a cabin in Wyoming researching and digging for fossils. This past summer was Kaye’s most eventful.
In 2005, Mary Higby Schweitzer led a study that found soft tissue inside fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex bones. The team Kaye traveled with this summer sought to further her research, but instead ended up challenging her team’s findings.
After cracking open several bones of their own and looking at them through an electron microscope, Kaye’s team said that what Schweitzer thought was tissue is actually bacterial slime that seeped into the bone over time.
The stir of controversy that came from his team’s results could be found in National Geographic News and on other sites online at the end of July.
“I don’t have a career at stake over this,” Kaye said. “I just wanted to see what I’d find.”
Just before the news came out, Kaye suffered a heart attack one day while he and Carol were out digging. He spent three days in a Casper hospital before the couple decided to cut the trip short. So, about a month before they would normally head home, the couple came back to Sierra Vista, where Kaye is now trying to take it easy and walk every day.
But if you went to visit, you’d never know it. His excitement over talking about dinosaur bones and hunting for lost planets is insatiable.
Kaye and his wife moved to Sierra Vista about a year and a half ago from Chicago, but have been away from their home for much of that time because of their annual trips to Wyoming.
They’re in the midst of taking out walls of their house to make it a little more open. Pictures are still leaning against tables, cardboard boxes hold bits of fossilized dinosaur poop, and there’s a giant Brontothere skull elevated where the dining room table should be.
Their passion is digging up fossils. Beautifying the dining room is a work in progress.
It’s Kaye’s basement that seems to be in the best shape. It’s where he keeps multiple light microscopes and an electron microscope, which uses a computer monitor to view a fossil at a magnification of up to 100,000 times.
Don’t be fooled. All the equipment in Kaye’s basement isn’t new. It’s from eBay.
With all this technology at his fingertips, it’s surprising to learn that Kaye is a mere amateur at digging fossils and looking through telescopes. He doesn’t have any kind of degree in any scientific field.
“I think what’s different about Tom is that he’s doing the science part of it,” said Matt Carrano, Kaye’s longtime friend and fellow fossil researcher. “That’s unusual, and it is pretty remarkable when you know the background in his life. I think people who don’t know him personally would just assume he’s a regular paleontologist. He doesn’t come across as an amateur in any respect.”
As a child, Kaye was one of those inquisitive boys who wanted to be a scientist. He remembers finding a telescope in the garbage on the street and setting it up on the sidewalk to try to look at stars.
“The owner came out of the house and took it away from me,” Kaye said. “He said, ‘My wife shouldn’t have thrown this out.’ ”
But he became disillusioned by a science teacher while in high school, and he did some traveling instead of going to school. He decided to try out the business world, and after numerous starts and stops, one idea made money: paintball.
His companies designed air guns and the designs were even used by police and military. He got into the business in 1987, and soon afterward, he got back into science.
But why fossils?
Kaye and his wife read an article about some fossils to dig up just an hour outside of Chicago, so they went and “treasure hunted” for the weekend.
“Later at the library I found this book about fossils,” Kaye said. “And this famous paleontologist had written about these bones in Wyoming that no one had bothered to pick up.”
So, the couple found cheap plane tickets and decided they’d be the ones to go pick them up. When they got there, the bones the author had been talking about were actually on public land, meaning they had to get a permit to be able to dig there.
As luck would have it, they ran into a local woman who took them on a whirlwind, weeklong hunt on private land to find dinosaur bones.
They were hooked. Now they have a system where Carol finds the bones, and Kaye digs while also working on the research and science of them.
Kaye met up with a few graduate students from the University of Chicago in the early 1990s while looking to lead a fossil-collecting expedition to Montana.
Carrano was one of the graduate students who went west with Kaye. Carrano is now the curator of dinosauria at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
“Tom was always more involved than the typical amateur,” Carrano said. “He looked at the scientific side, he wasn’t just a collector. He was always interested in trying to figure things out about it.”
The second time Carrano went on a dig with Kaye was to Wyoming, where Kaye still spends his summers bringing back fossils. Many of them are stashed either in his basement tool drawers or in plastic bags and cardboard boxes in the dining room. But he also has larger bones in his collection, like a Triceratops horn and a Brontothere shoulder blade.
“The Triceratops was like cows back then,” Kaye said. “They’re everywhere.”
Those of the meat eaters are the tough bones to track down. Any time a fossil hunter finds the smallest bit of a claw or tooth from a meat eater, it’s exciting.
A chunk of claw that looks like a piece of rock you might pick up off the ground might not sound that exciting, but Kaye is also the kind of guy who even keeps around fossilized dinosaur droppings, mostly for kicks.
“I’m going to be nice to you,” he said as he picked up a small, oblong fossil. “But when kids come over, I have them smell this, then lick it, then tell them it’s dinosaur poop.”
The astronomy side of Kaye’s life came back in the mid-1990s. He soon realized you can’t see very much if you look through a telescope in the big city. Especially from only about seven miles north of O’Hare Airport.
Today, he and his team of amateurs are on the hunt for extrasolar planets, which are planets orbiting a star other than our own sun. In 2000, Kaye actually led the first team of non-professionals to detect a known planet orbiting around a star using amateur — homemade — equipment. His quest to discover an unknown extrasolar planet is a big part of the reason he moved to Arizona.
“You know, at the leading edge of science, no one knows what they’re doing,” Kaye said. “That’s why you call it research.”
Just a few yards from Kaye’s house is his current homemade observatory, much smaller than the one he’s planning to build next to it. He calls the current observatory the Bubble Dome, made out of a white barrel and a water tank. It resembles a miniature water tower.
Next to the Bubble Dome is a field of tall grass, where, Kaye points out, he’s going to build his larger observatory next month.
Carrano isn’t surprised that Kaye is taking on such a huge project.
“It’s a perfect spot, right?” he said. “That’s what I would do if I were him.”
Kaye can’t wait for the enormous telescope mirror waiting in a wooden box to have a home after the observatory is built.
When it comes to dinosaur bones and looking through telescopes, a career in science isn’t what Kaye is after. It’s the thrill of the hunt.
HERALD/REVIEW reporter Liz Manring can be reached at 515-4682 or liz.manring@svherald.com.
Samantha wrote on Aug 19, 2008 11:47 AM: