First Flight

Like many another kid in West New York, N. J., Alfred Siefker, 17, wears a longish haircut, low-slung pegged trousers and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The style suggests the drugstore cowboy, but under the disguise Alfred practices a different skill. He is already a dedicated scientist who has just rewritten a chapter of paleontology.

Last week at Manhattan's famed American Museum of Natural History. Alfred and two friends--Joseph Geiler, 16. and Michael Bandrowski, 16--exhibited the fossil of a winged reptile, oldest airborne vertebrate known to man. Siefker's protorosaur, said Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, head of the museum's department of vertebrate paleontology, "proves that vertebrates attempted flight some 10 million years earlier than anyone suspected."

New Deal. Alfred's fossil hunting began when he was only 13, when he hiked to the abandoned Granton quarry in North Bergen, a mile from his home. Friends showed him the remains of ancient fish in a layer of fine-grained black shale and Alfred became a paleontologist on the spot. He spent most of his spare time in the old quarry. At night he pored over books on his new hobby. Soon he had an impressive fossil collection, mostly of primitive fish, such as coelacanths, which he took to the Museum of Natural History.

The museum's paleontologists had often rummaged through the black shale of the Granton quarry, but none of them could match Alfred's collection of fossils. Dr.

Colbert made a deal. If Alfred brought his best finds to the museum, he could work in its well-equipped laboratory.

Last summer Alfred began to prowl the quarry with Joe Geiler and Mike Bandrowski, who had joined the project just a few months before. A large area was being leveled for the construction of a supermarket, and Alfred led his small but expert crew to a place where shale lay near the surface. They dug down to the dark rock and brought big slabs to the surface. They found some coelacanth fossils first but ignored them as commonplace. Then they split another slab, and Alfred knew at once that they had come upon something extraordinary. In the shale was the 7 1/2in. skeleton of a delicate creature that looked like a cross between a lizard and a monstrous dragonfly. The boys started to clean the fossil but had sense enough to stop before they did damage. After keeping it for a while, Alfred dutifully brought his find to the museum.

Ancient Glider. Dr. Colbert recognized the importance of the discovery. The age of Granton's black shale is known quite accurately; it formed as silt on the bottom of the great lake that covered the Jersey meadows 175 million years ago. In that dim age, the famous flying reptiles, the pterosaurs, had not yet evolved. Yet here was a reptile equipped with something like wings. Dr. Colbert took the fossil to the laboratory, where skilled technicians spent months clearing shale from around the delicate bones.

The ribs of the little reptile, says Dr. Colbert, supported a fixed wing 10 inches from tip to tip. This enabled the creature to glide like a modern flying squirrel, but not to fly actively. Presumably its way of life was to climb trees and launch itself into gliding flight when it wanted to move to another tree or when danger threatened. On one of these glides it must have landed in the lake where its flesh was eaten by fish and its sunken skeleton was covered slowly with silt.

The skeleton of the ancient reptile still belongs to Alfred, but it will probably stay at the museum. In return, Alfred, who intends to become a professional paleontologist, has received a reward more welcome than money. Next summer the museum will take him on a fossil-hunting expedition to Colorado.

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