Jeanette considered this and said, “I still don’t see why they would care about us. We didn’t kill Toby and we’re just a bunch of nuts digging up bones.”
“These bones are worth a great deal of money,” I pointed out.
She considered that, then said, “Tell you what. You work on Edith, try to find out what she knows. I’ll let Pick know he’s got three days and then we’re going to pack up our bones and go home. We need to be thinking about getting in our hay, anyway. Is that OK?”
“Yes, except let’s go in tomorrow.”
She shook her head. “Look, even if Cade has designs on these bones, this is the Square C. Nobody’s going to bother us here.”
“Jeanette, you grew up in Fillmore County so you have a powerful belief in the sanctity of private property. Believe me, Cade Morgan doesn’t operate from that perspective.”
“Well, Edith does.”
“Edith? I wouldn’t depend on her.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” she promised but I could tell she had her mind made up. We were stuck out here for three more days.
Pick’s new site didn’t look like much, just a step of ancient black-and-gray mud on the side of a fifty-foot-high peninsula, capped by a seam of rotten coal and a layer of sandstone. Above and to the right of the step was a cave. I knew that cave from my rides out by the butte and had even gone inside it just to see what I could see. It wasn’t very deep, likely formed by water seeping down from the top. I’d seen rabbits in there but otherwise it was empty.
Laura appraised the site and concluded it was good matrix to dig. It wasn’t too hard and or too soft, she said, and began to lay out where she wanted us to start and how we would proceed. Start we did and within a few hours, Amelia, on her hands and knees working with an ice pick and a brush, found something. “Bone!” she cried.
Laura carefully crawled over to the find. “Everybody back up, please,” she said. Then, after a quick appraisal, she added, “It’s bone all right. Good work, Amelia.”
Amelia grinned. When she stood up, Ray was beside her, telling her how proud he was of her. She fell into his arms and right there in front of God and everybody, kissed him full on the lips. “I love you, Ray Coulter,” she said.
Ray took off his hat, threw it in the air, and let out a mighty whoop followed by, “I love you, too, Amelia Thomason!”
While the rest of us were watching Ray and Amelia, Laura was focused on the bone. She scraped around it, then whisked off more dirt. Whatever it was, it was big. “It’s the ilium, two paired bones,” she finally announced. “But this is the top of them, not the side. That’s unusual.” She dug into the dirt around the twin bones and found more bone. “I think this is the end of a femur that fits into the pelvis,” she said, then dug and whisked on the other side of the iliums. “The joint of the other femur,” she announced, then sat back on her haunches and whistled. “Somebody get Pick. Now!”
Philip went running and within minutes, brought Pick back. Pick went down on his hands and knees to inspect the bones. “What do you think it is?” he asked Laura.
While we all strained to hear, Laura said, in a voice tinged with awe, “I believe this is a Tyrannosaur standing upright. Every T. rex ever found has always been on its side.”
Pick nodded. “You’re almost right, Laura, but this animal is not standing. It’s sitting. Or, I should say, she is sitting.”
“On her nest,” Laura said, understanding what he was getting at. “She’s protecting her nest.”
“Even with a torrential rain pouring down on top of her, she is nurturing her chicks. Yes, I think so.”
Pick crawled off the site, then went over to a slab of sandstone and sat down, his chin resting on his palms. We all waited while he thought over whatever he was thinking. Finally, he said, “We can’t expose this skeleton from the top down. The articulation would probably fall away and we would lose knowledge of her posture. I propose we come at her horizontally and expose only one side.”
“In effect, a bas relief,” Laura said.
“Yes. It may be that we’ll have to leave her that way to be studied. We’ll also have to build a structure over her for protection. Great care must be taken to preserve everything we find. Laura, I leave it to you to make the necessary plans to make this happen. No paleontologist has ever tried this, not with a creature as big as this one, but I know you can do it.”
Pick’s confidence in Laura was well-placed. A couple of hours later, she presented us with the plan. Essentially, it meant starting off to the left side of the T. rex, using our picks and shovels to remove all the dirt down to the probable level of the animal’s feet, then shaving off the matrix trowel by trowel, ice pick by ice pick, brush by brush until we found bone again.