Where do you dig for fossils at the UO? Try an unmarked basement.

Murder-cows, hyena-pigs, and bear-dogs! Strange animals roamed Oregon millions of years ago. Although a few of the showiest fossils are displayed at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, most of the bones are kept in an unmarked basement room of Pacific Hall, one of the least visible buildings on campus.

Janell and I are fascinated by fossils, so we wrangled a tour of the paleontology collection, a subterranean archive staffed by three volunteers. I wanted to learn more about the recently discovered murder-cow, but I was also curious to see what had become of the bones collected by Thomas Condon, the famous science professor who explored the John Day fossil beds in the 1860s.

Born in Ireland, Condon came to The Dalles as a Congregationalist missionary in 1852. When gold was discovered near John Day in 1862, The Dalles became the supply point for thousands of men heading to the new strike. The route to the mines zigzagged 150 miles across desert canyons, mountains — and colorful strata full of fossils. A learned man, Condon was more interested in the fossils than the gold. He collected evidence of tropical plants, three-toed horses and saber-toothed tigers. He cataloged the fossils with his own color-coded system.

When the University of Oregon opened in 1876 Condon packed up his rocks and moved to Eugene. As the school’s first geology professor, he used the fossils in lectures to support Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Today Condon’s collection fills a dozen metal cabinets in the Pacific Hall basement. I exaggerated when I said this room is unmarked. A note beside the door reads, “Yes, we are a lichen” in Dutch.

Barry Hughes, the white-bearded volunteer who oversees the collection, explained that visitors are generally directed across campus to the displays at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History. The basement archive is mostly for researchers, but it has treasures nonetheless. In addition to Condon’s collection, it has locked cabinets with “type specimens” — the original fossils that were used to designate a species.

Hailey Rauch, a graduate student who labels specimens, showed us the original fossils for a rare eastern Oregon mammoth and a spike-tooth salmon. Millions of years ago, giant salmon spawned in eastern Oregon lakes where there is now only desert. The male fish developed spikes that stuck out sideways from their snouts, presumably to chase away other males.

“In the ’80s and ’90s,” Hughes told me, “this place was a repository for ‘stuff’” — a jumble of donated rocks that were mostly unsorted. “Our job was to put everything into cabinets.”

Hundreds of cabinets, each with dozens of sliding trays, fill the 60-foot-long basement. Among the specimens are giant, crablike trilobites and curling snaillike ammonites. “That one was bought from a street vendor in Morocco,” Barry said, pointing to a particularly beautiful specimen.

Another cabinet held hundreds of tiny bottles, each with the fossilized tooth of an extinct bat, anteater or rodent. I remarked, “You never know when you’ll need an ancient bat tooth.” Apparently missing my ironic tone, Hughes agreed. He explained that ion analysis of fossil teeth can reveal an extinct animal’s diet, giving a picture of a lost environment.

At this point Rauch showed me the difference between mammoth teeth and mastodon teeth. The 6-inch-long molars of a mammoth are wavy for grinding grass. Mastodon teeth are pointier, for chomping leaves. Apparently mammoths grazed like cows while mastodons browsed like elk.

“Here are the sloth femurs,” she said, pulling out a drawer with 3-foot-long bones. “We’ve got a lot of rhinos in the back.”

Our tour culminated with the oldest fossil in the collection, a 3.2-billion-year-old mottled brick from western Australia.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s Archaean,” Rauch said.

“Meaning what?”

She explained that scientists until recently did not believe that life on Earth had begun so early. Greg Retallack, a UO paleontologist, has been discovering fossils of tiny organisms in ancient mud.

“Yes, but what are they?”

“Marine algae?” Rauch suggested.

“Maybe lichens,” Hughes said.

I changed subjects. “What about the murder-cow?”

I’d seen a television feature about this extinct beast a few years ago. Sometimes called a hyena-pig but officially named Harpagolestes uintensis, it had been a cow-sized carnivore with jaws that could crush bones.

It turned out that the murder-cow had indeed been identified from a 50-million-year-old jawbone in the paleontology collection. But the bone was now across campus, displayed in the Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

Instead Rauch offered me the skull of a bear-dog. It was a similar bone-crushing carnivore. She demonstrated by snapping the toothy jaws together.

After the tour, as we stood in the basement hall, I asked why the paleontology collection was hidden in a remote basement. The rest of Pacific Hall had been recently remodeled, with glass doors and shiny fixtures, but the fossils were in a run-down, windowless, concrete-block room.

“As valuable as we are,” Hughes said, “we’re not generating money for the university.” He explained that grants go to flashier fields like molecular biology and anthropology.

The fossil collection remains where it is, run by volunteers, partly because it would be hard to move hundreds of cabinets full of rocks.

Condon, the early science professor, would probably be amazed by the scientific research going on at the university today.

But I think he would also be glad to know that his fossils are still here, cataloged and preserved by people who love paleontology.