The Dinosaur Hunter(24)

This struck me as weird. “Faith? Vision? Is paleontology a science or a religion?”

Pick smiled. “Although I would probably be beat up at the next Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting if anyone heard me say this, there is a point in our studies where we go beyond the pedantic and venture forth into the realm of the imagination.”

“I do the same thing when I think about sex,” I offered.

This made Pick laugh. “Let me turn you into a dinosaur hunter, Mike,” he said. “Look around. Within fifty feet of where we’re standing, there is a significant dinosaur bone. Find it for me.”

I was willing to play his game so I looked around the jumble of rocks, pebbles, scrub pine and juniper, amidst the glaring sun and deep shadows of the BLM. I didn’t see anything except exactly what I’d seen a lot of during the last ten years. Mostly dirt.

“Remember those puzzles when you were a kid where you had to pick out something that didn’t fit?” he asked. “Approach your search in that spirit.”

I gave it another try and still didn’t see any dinosaur bones. Finally, he said, “Look at that little drainage over there.”

He was referring to a narrow channel that ran from the top of the hill all the way to the base. At the bottom were a jumble of small rocks and pebbles which were brown, red, yellow, and black except for one. I saw now that the coloration of that rock was different from the rest, a pale yellow. When I studied it, I saw that it also had symmetry. “You see it now, don’t you?” Pick asked, quietly.

I walked over to the thing and picked it up. It was about the size of my fist, was oval in shape, and there were places on it where it looked like something had broken off. “What is it?” I asked, bringing it back for him to inspect.

“It is the caudal vertebra of a small Hadrosaur. Probably an Edmontosaurus, the most common duckbill found in this formation. Caudal means its tail.”

“It sure looks beat up.”

“It is. There’s only the centrum left. Broken off are the arch that protected the spinal cord and the spines that connected it to the tendons that gave the tail its strength. Every bone has its own history. Mostly that history is one of violence.”

“Like getting killed and eaten,” I said.

“Yes, predation is certainly a factor. The bones of animals killed by other animals get ingested, stepped on, or strewn around as the skeleton is passed from the top to the bottom of the predator chain, that is to say from the animal that killed it to the scavengers. Or the animal may have been torn apart by a sudden flood, or burned to a crisp by volcanic ash, or maybe it simply fell off a cliff into a river and was ripped apart by rocks and currents. Whatever happened to it, natural forces tend to move skeletons around until the individual bones are far apart or completely destroyed. That’s why discovering an intact animal is so rare.”

I held up the vertebra. “Can I have it?”

“No. You have to have a permit.” He held out his hand and I reluctantly placed the vertebra in it.

Sort of hooked on this finding dino bones thing, I started looking closer at my surroundings. On a little ledge, about a third of the way up the hill, I spotted another rock the same subtle shade of yellow as my duckbill vertebra. I climbed up to it, slipping and sliding, and picked the thing up. About four inches long, it kind of looked like a chicken drumstick. I brought it back down and handed over my find.

Pick admired it which I have to confess pleased me. “Very nice. Where’s the rest of it?” This must have been a paleontology joke because he chuckled before saying, “This is a fragment of a toe bone of a Oviraptorid. A theropod. Note that it’s hollow? That’s the clue we have that it’s a meat-eater. Even the T. rex had hollow bones.”

I looked around some more while Pick made a GPS reading, jotted something in his little notebook, then said, “We’d best get to the truck,” and started walking. Once again, it was the wrong way. I caught up with him and pointed in the correct direction. “Why don’t you use the GPS to find your truck?” I asked.

He looked sheepish. “I forgot to mark it.”

“You get lost out here, you’re going to die.”

“I always find my way back, eventually. For a paleontologist, being lost is not necessarily a bad thing. It means I see places I wouldn’t otherwise see.”

I gave that some thought. “You’re dangerous, Pick,” I concluded, “mostly to yourself.”

Off we went again, this time successfully reaching the truck where he put the Packy dome, my duckbill vertebra, and the thessy-whatever toe bone in a plastic storage box, then opened the glove compartment, took out a folded document, and handed it to me. There were two sheets in the document. The top one was a letter with the official letterhead of the BLM signed by Ted Brescoe. The letter said, in effect, that the names on the attached sheet, all representing Yosemite University, had permission to go on BLM land and collect fossils. When I turned to the second sheet, I saw the names of Dr. Norman Pickford, Tanya Simius, and Laura Wilson. All had the same address: Department of Paleontology, Yosemite University, California. No town. No zip code.