“OK,” I said. “All this is too deep for me.”
Laura laughed. “And for me. Maybe Pick will explain it to you. He’s better at it than I am. I probably screwed it all up.”
Laura showed me how to use the ice pick and trowel to carefully work around a bone and how to use the amber liquid in the plastic bottles, which was a glue called vinac, to harden the bone before it was removed. “If we have a stable bone, like a horn or a claw,” she explained, “we just wrap it in aluminum foil and number it. If it’s fractured, we apply a plaster cast. If it’s a big enough bone, we dig around and under it, leaving just a little pedestal for the bone to sit on. Pedestaling is what the technique is called, as a matter of fact. We wrap it with aluminum foil and wet paper towels, put strips of burlap in plaster, and lay them across the bone at a variety of angles to give the cast strength. After it hardens, we can flip the bone over and finish up. After that, it’s ready for the lab. Of course, getting it there, heavy as the bones and the jackets are, is always a chore but we get it done, one way or the other.”
“Where is this skeleton going?” I asked.
Laura gave that some thought, then said, “I don’t honestly know. Somewhere where it will be appreciated, that much I can tell you. Pick sees to that.” She pointed at a bone still in the ground. “That’s a toe. Its shape indicates it was used for digging.”
I looked at the bone which was about six inches long and shaped like an arrowhead. “What did it dig?” I wondered.
“We think Trikes liked to eat ferns. Maybe they needed to dig around the other vegetation to get at them or maybe they dug up the entire plant. They had a beak, like a big parrot, which I suppose was effective at chopping plants. Their molars were a little like a cow’s or camel’s.”
“Did they eat grass?”
“There was no grass, at least not the kind we have now.”
“You’re kidding! No grass? I thought there was always grass in Montana.”
Her eyes grew distant, a trait I’d noticed was common for paleontologists. “The world the Triceratops lived in, Mike, was a far different place than this one. Although the theropods, the meat-eaters, could probably live today—meat is still meat and I guess they could eat your cows—the plant-eaters would not survive. Vegetation and the seasons have just changed too much. Maybe that’s why the theropods live on through the birds while there are no descendents of the plant-eaters. It’s sad, really. Can you imagine the millions of years it took to evolve a creature like this, just to have it disappear?”
“What killed them, do you think? I know you only care about how they lived but you must have a theory on why they disappeared.”
“Oh, I think environmental and evolutionary pressures are the likely culprits. We also think there’s less oxygen in the atmosphere now so maybe it just got too hard for them to breathe. Anyway, whatever it was, I don’t think it was anything so dramatic as a meteor or comet, although something like that may have pushed them over the edge. Maybe a virus, even. I just don’t know. No one does, no matter what they say.”
I glanced down and saw Pick was awake again and peering into the box where Tanya had placed the plastic sample bags. He took one of the bags out, pondered it, then put it back. The way he held it, I couldn’t see what was in it, not that I would have recognized what it was, anyway.
“What did you find this morning?” I asked.
“Just odds and ends,” Laura replied. “You ready to help dig up this old boy?”
“Sure thing.”
Laura called Tanya and she climbed up beside us. Pick wandered off and then things got quiet for the rest of the morning as the three of us dug and scraped. It was hard work and my fingernails, knees, and back took a beating. I looked up once and found both women smiling at me. “What?” I asked.
“You’d make a good grad student,” Laura said. “You work hard and you don’t complain much.”
“I like that in a man, too,” Tanya said, giving me a dazzling smile. I confess my heart sped up a beat.
After a while, Tanya got up from the dig, got her backpack off the truck, dropped in some water bottles, and went off in the direction Pick had gone. I sat back, swigged some water, and appreciated her trim little figure until she’d disappeared around the hill. “Where’s she going?” I asked.
“To find Pick,” Laura said. “He’ll be lost by now. She’ll try to track him down or give him a call on the radio to figure out where he is. He never goes far. He always finds bones and that slows him down.”