Mark Tarner talks as passionately about the portion of a Titanosaurus tooth he found with his family during a trip to rural Nebraska as he does about making Christmas crunch and candy cane fudge.
Most people associate Tarner with chocolate.
Who knew the founder and owner of the South Bend Chocolate Company spends his vacation time roaming ranches in the American West excavating dinosaur and other bones?
Everyone will now.
Several days ago, Tarner, an amateur paleontologist, debuted the Dino Store, a tiny storefront tucked behind his downtown chocolate cafe on South Michigan Street.
It contains bones, fossils and rocks the Tarner family has found while vacationing in South Dakota, Montana and Nebraska, as well as some items Tarner has purchased over the years and some commercially packaged bones and fossils.
"Welcome to our nerdy dinosaur world," he says. "We want to find a whole dinosaur, but we come across all this in the process."
The Dino Store feels like a page out of a museum shop or Dinosphere at the Indianapolis Children's Museum.
In fact, Tarner says, he has trailed behind real paleontologists, picking up their unwanted bone fragments. He says the store contains many of the things he doesn't have a use for that others could find interesting.
The Dino Store contains unique mammal jaws that belonged to squirrels and camels more than 21 million years ago. Pieces of petrified wood are sold by the pound. Old turtle shells and a Hadrosaur femur can be viewed in a display case.
The store is much more than Tarner, the candy man. It more accurately represents his entire family. Tarner, his wife, Julie, and their four children met at the store Thursday to talk about their hobby and joint venture.
Emily, 18, and Anna, 10, are the most vivid in their descriptions of family vacations spent on microsites -- small areas that are loaded with ancient teeth, turtle shells and other findings.
While they have never visited Disneyland, no one is complaining.
"If Dad puts me on a microsite for a day with some water, I'm content," says 18-year-old Emily, whose fascination with rocks started the family excavations in the early '90s.
"That's when I caught the bug," Tarner admits.
His vocabulary is impressive to the nonpaleontologist. His knowledge about dinosaurs seems as extensive as his understanding of confections.
Not long after the family started collecting bones and fossils, Tarner and his kids incorporated a company called PaleoPartners.
Items in the store range from petrified wood that starts at $1.49 per pound, to mammal jaws that run from $30 to $100, all the way up to an Oviraptor egg (Tarner bought this) from the late Cretaceous period, priced at $2,000.
The hottest seller so far, however, has been the $3 mystery bags. Anna, 10, has already had to restock them.
"You don't know what's going to be inside," Anna says about their popularity, as she straightens a couple dozen lunch-size brown paper bags that fill a table.
A homemade sign indicates how each bag may contain an ammonite (an extinct group of marine invertebrate), crystal, ancient turtle shell or crinoid fossil.
Elizabeth, 8, has been nicknamed "Eagle Eye" by her siblings because she is so good at finding fossils and bones. Her older brother, Sam, admits he enjoys the end result of their finds more than "the hunt."
His dream is to find a Tyrannosaurus rex.
In a separate nearby room called "the lab," Tarner shows off a couple of dinosaur heads, all kinds of bone fragments and a table filled with dozens of sequoia seeds.
The seeds don't look like anything special, until Tarner explains they are somewhere between 65 million and 83 million years old. He hopes to open the lab for tours in the future.
"Everything is an education," he says, noting how the Dino Store is open during South Bend Chocolate Cafe hours. "We hope this draws families who visit downtown. And I hope it gets kids more interested in science."
His wife nods.
"Mark is such a good teacher, so I know he will stop and talk to the kids about his hobby," she says. "I'll make fun of him, but I think it's cool. I'd be bored in someone who didn't have so many hobbies."
Have you heard?
Van Horne Jewelers, 7145 Heritage Square Drive, Mishawaka, is celebrating its 86th anniversary with an open house from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday. ... Garcia's Mexican Family Restaurant is now under construction at 110 N. Main St., downtown South Bend. ... Golden Corral is still on track to open its doors Monday at 135 E. Douglas Road, Mishawaka, on the southeast corner of Main Street. ... Dunkin' Donuts opened its doors Monday at 52931 Indiana 933, South Bend. ... Cambodian Thai is scheduled to relocate in early January in downtown South Bend. The locally owned restaurant, currently located at 229 S. Michigan
St., is moving to the former O'Sullivan's building on the corner of Michigan and Wayne streets. ... Join our next live online chat at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Heidi Prescott's column runs in the South Bend Tribune on Fridays and Sundays. When she's not shopping, contact her at hprescott@sbtinfo.com or 574-235-6070. You can also talk retail at Facebook.com/thebasket and at Twitter.com/marketbasket.
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