By Jim Bissett, The Dominion Post
BARRACKVILLE – The “Wooly Mammoth” has passed on.
That’s how family, friends and colleagues came to know Ray Garton – in part for his bearded, hirsute appearance, but mainly for the way he earned his paycheck.
For decades, the Marion County paleontologist was the pre-eminent host for prehistoric devotees in a place where the Ice Age left big footprints.
He died two weeks ago at J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital. He was 75.
At his request, he was cremated. A celebration of his life is being planned.
Garton, who called Barrackville home, is survived by his wife Mary Ellen, a teacher who stood in front of Marion County classrooms for years.
Layering his personal archaeology are those aforementioned friends and colleagues, plus the people along the way who relied on him as a homegrown science resource.
That’s because Garton was the guy you called after your kid came in with that … something.
Was it a T. rex tooth – or just a weirdly shaped piece of gravel?
The Wooly Mammoth would tell you true, while tossing in a quick lesson on geology and fossils, just a fun sidebar.
And should you be wondering, the primordial climes that became what is now West Virginia weren’t really a favorite hangout for dinosaurs – though mastodons, saber-toothed cats (and yes, Wooly Mammoths), dug the place just fine.
Uncovering a career
Garton dug the digs, too, and not just here. He went on several excursions to the Promised Land of Paleontologists from all over: Montana.
The evolution of his career included a stint as a preparator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
“Preperators” are those paleontologists who specifically work on the cleaning of fossils – a precisely delicate endeavor – while also casting molds for new, high-quality replicas of very old bones.
He also taught at the former Salem College while serving as curator of the Museum of Geology and Natural History at Mont Chateau in Morgantown.
Pittsburgh was where he made his bones in the business of paleontology.
Garton put those earned preperator skills to work in 1999, when he co-founded “Prehistoric Planet,” a collector’s store for dino buffs, which he set up in the former Middletown Mall in White Hall.
While the store quickly became known for its offbeat inventory, the fossil replica business was what made it famous.
Timeless work
Full-scale, skeletal renderings of the creatures that once roamed the Earth poured out of the place, to be delivered to museums and historical societies across the U.S. and the world.
Such replicas, he said, are the industry standard – just because.
After all, he said, actual fossils are obviously old.
Which also means they’re brittle and can crack or crumble.
However, a period-correct replica, he said, is lightweight and durable.
Versatile, too.
Curators can display the dinos in creative ways without running support cables that wreck the aesthetics.
For real (really)
Meanwhile, he billed his store as “A museum – where everything’s for sale.”
The paleontologist knew how to make a marketing imprint.
One day, shoppers went on an actual “dig” – in a huge, sand-filled storage container housing a passel of fossil teeth some 100 million years old.
The teeth, genuine, were uncovered during a dig in Morocco and sent to Garton by a paleontologist friend.
“Whatever you find, you keep,” Garton told one customer, an 11-year-old boy there with his mom.
“For real?” the kid asked.
“For real,” the Wooly Mammoth answered, with a Jurassic-sized grin.