The Dinosaur Hunter(35)

Beneath the awning of the tent, Laura had another table set up along with two unfolded folding chairs. She had emptied some crackers in a plastic bowl and taken the top off two plastic containers, one with a creamed cheese something, the other the tuna salad. She stuck a white plastic knife into each. I subsided in one of the chairs and handed over her g&t. Cocktails were served.

Everything was pleasant. The sun hid behind a big puffy cloud, a little breeze came mewing over us, and no mosquitoes, flies, or gnats chose to bite us. Laura confirmed the obvious. “This is nice,” she said.

“Agreed,” I replied.

“The drink is excellent.”

“Some people would say it’s the gin that’s important, or the tonic, but actually it’s the lime.”

“I would say all three ingredients are important,” Laura replied. “The lime keeps scurvy away, the tonic is a preemptive strike against malaria, and the gin is an ancient tranquilizer, good for the heart.”

Laura had bested me and I acknowledged it with a nod of my head, saying, “Well, anyway, I was glad to see the limes in the fridge since I forgot to bring any.”

“I bought them in Bozeman,” she said. “Little natural foods shop downtown.”

“Bozeman’s nice,” I said.

“Yep. I went to school at Montana State. In a way, you might say I was one of Jack Horner’s protégés. You know who he is, right?”

I did, mainly because I loved Michael Crichton’s books and the movies made from them. I said, “Jurassic Park advisor, Crichton’s model for the paleontologist in the book, an author in his own right, and so forth?”

“Well, those are a few of Jack’s attributes. Actually, he’s important to paleontology because he changed the way we think about dinosaurs with his study of Maiasaura, a duckbill he named and described. Its name means ‘good mother lizard’ and Horner showed by his excavations how Maiasaurs took care of their nestlings. For the first time, somebody was talking about dinosaurs as social animals that parented their little ones. Without that insight, we might have been stumbling around in the dark for years about these animals. His insights gave other paleontologists a platform to build on. Now, we can infer that nearly all dinosaurs led complex, interesting lives, much like the animals of today.”

“What’s the word for when you think of animals like people?” I asked.

“Anthropomorphic,” she instantly answered, cocking an eyebrow. “Perhaps Horner and the rest of us are a bit guilty of that but I don’t care. Animals feel a lot of the things we feel. They get afraid like us, and sometimes they panic and do stupid things, just as we do. They sleep, they drowse, they even ponder. Have you ever seen a squirrel stare at one of those bird feeders designed to stop them? They figure out a way to get at it, eventually. This is not by trial and error. They think, Mike. More importantly, many animals, and Horner showed this included some dinosaurs, feel a type of love, love of their children, love of their mates. Oh, I’m sure Jack Horner would argue he didn’t say anything like that at all, but was only describing the methodology used to perpetuate the species, but I believe the emotion they felt was very akin to what we think of as love.”

“It’s hard to imagine they had time to do anything but avoid getting eaten by T. rexes,” I observed.

She sipped her drink, then allowed herself a moment before answering. “Maybe things weren’t quite as horrible in their world as we think. Maybe, in fact, they would think our world is the horrible one, what with all our rushing around, our polluting, our broken families, our terrible reliance on mind-altering drugs—your excellent g-and-t, of course, gets a pass here—and on and on.”

“Well,” I said, “the next time I’m in Bozeman, I might just go shake Dr. Horner’s hand. You said you were his protégé. Why aren’t you still with him?”

“A higher calling named Pick Pickford. It was an emotional decision, I’ll confess, not an intellectual one. Luckily, I already had my master’s degree before I met him at the annual SVP conference. That’s the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists. I heard him speak, saw the results of his work, and asked him if I could help. He said he had no money and I said that was no problem. I had a little and it was his if he’d take me on his next expedition. Been with him ever since.”

“Happily?”

She shrugged. “Most of the time. We’ve found some important stuff together.”

I decided to be blunt. “What else out here have you found besides this Trike?”