"Really, truly, Jackie," Helen said. "I've never seen anything like it, or heard of anything like it. You say you know where you found it?"
Jackie looked hurt. "Of course I do, Helen! Haven't I been keeping a journal since my second year doing this?"
"I'm sorry. I should have said: will you show us where you found it, and where you think it came from?"
"Of course. Let me get my hiking boots on, and we'll go out there now."
* * *
"There" turned out to be a few miles out, not all that far from the old dig site, but to the northwest up a small arroyo. "I found it lying over here, half under some sand. I think it washed down from somewhere up the arroyo."
Helen measured the area by eye, trying to visualize the rains, the wash coming down, the size of the fossil.
She thought Jackie was right. "Let's go up a ways, then, and see if we find anything."
Luck, luck, luck.
The word kept repeating itself over and over in Helen's mind, as she stood there looking at the wall of the arroyo in a state of half-shock.
"Jesus Christ," Joe repeated for the fifth time, finally straightening up from his examination. "Helen, that's a Deinonychus, or I'm just a first-year student."
"And if the rest is in the same condition, we've got ourselves a fully articulated skeleton."
Amateur or not, Jackie understood how very rare that was, and her excitement was only restrained by an attempt to be more professional and dignified than the professionals around her. Theropod skeletons, like the Deinonychus, were rare enough to be noteworthy, but fully articulated skeletons—skeletons that had remained pretty much connected as they had been in life—were vanishingly rare.
Helen glanced down the arroyo, frowning. "Odd, though."
"What's odd?"
She pulled out the unknown fossil. "If this came from here, there's no way it's a shell. Not of a water dweller, anyway."
Joe nodded. "These are land formations; late Cretaceous, maybe even Maastrichtian."
"No 'maybe' involved, Joe. Look at where your hand is."
Joe looked at the rock wall he'd been leaning against. "What—"
He suddenly started laughing. "You can't be serious, Helen! It's like pulling three jackpots in a row at Vegas!"
"What is it?" Jackie asked, seeing the narrow, dark band both Joe and Helen were staring at. Then she whipped around, eyes wide.
"You mean . . .?"
"Yes." Helen was hardly able to believe it herself. "It looks like our fossil is sitting right smack on the K-T boundary."
"Where the comet—um, sorry." Jackie caught herself before finishing the sentence. She tended to forget that the Alvarez Hypothesis was still a touchy subject for a lot of paleontologists, even if she herself thought it was a darn neat idea.
"Yes, where the comet." Helen said the words with a half-snort, half-chuckle.
Fortunately for Jackie, Helen was less hostile to the Alvarez Hypothesis than most members of her profession. She didn't doubt at all that an impact had happened at the K-T Boundary, which marked the end of the Mesozoic Era. She simply questioned whether it had the worldwide cataclysmic effects that the hypothesis proposed. There were other impact craters about as big as the one in Yucatan, after all. The Manicouagan, to name just one. But they'd had no discernable ecological effects at all; not even regional ones, so far as anyone could determine.
Nor had anyone ever really explained, to Helen's satisfaction, exactly how the impact had killed off so many species. Nor the peculiar mechanism by which it had killed off some, but not others. In what mystifying manner, for instance, had it killed off all ammonites—but spared their close relatives, the squids and the octopi? These were the sort of nitty-gritty questions that paleontologists focused on, and that physicists tended to ignore.
Still, she was willing to entertain it as a valid and testable hypothesis. In truth, she'd privately admit to herself, Helen's residual animosity toward the Alvarez Hypothesis was emotional rather than intellectual. Like most paleontologists, she was often rankled by the overbearing arrogance of many of the physicists who were so charmed by the hypothesis and took it as Revealed Truth. When they pontificated on the subject, physicists tended to dismiss the inconvenient facts paleontologists kept bringing up, much like an exasperated adult brushes aside the foolish questions of little children.
One of those facts, however, was that there was no evidence that any dinosaur had survived till the end of the Cretaceous. But now. . .
It looked as if they'd found the evidence.