The Dinosaur Hunter(96)

We attacked the site like maniacs, tons of earth moved, the spoil piling up below. It was nearly ten o’clock that night when we were done slicing off a nearly rectangular step in the side of the peninsula. We were ready to start moving toward the T. rex but Laura stopped us, telling us to get some rest and we’d start again at first light. There was no one to fix us dinner since we were all at the new dig site. All but Edith, that is. I don’t know where she was during all this, maybe on her fancy sat phone for all I knew, but I saw her when we staggered back into camp. She was in one of the chairs around the fire pit, looking glum. I hoped she was thinking about leaving. Tanya and I ate some crackers, drank a sports drink, and crawled into my tent. If the strange mechanical noises occurred that night, I didn’t hear them. I don’t think I would have heard an atom bomb.

The next morning, we all made a run on the cook tent to grab food, mostly cereal and bread. Nobody was willing to wait for a cooked breakfast. Ray and Amelia already had the coffee going, dark and stout. It never tasted so good. “Today,” Pick said as we prepared to trek to the new site, “we may make one of the most important discoveries ever made in the history of paleontology.”

Pick knew how to motivate the troops, I’ll give him that.

We toiled through the day, revealing more and more of the extraordinary creature. We stopped when Laura ordered us to stop so she could insure there was enough matrix to support the bones. This meant no pedestaling. We revealed only enough of the bone to see what it was, then left it in place. Gradually it began to take shape. The big T. rex’s tail drooped, her legs were drawn up along her rib cage, and her neck was down. And around her was a set of small bones, snuggled against her leg. A chick maybe a yard high, still sixty-five million years later struggling to get closer to its mother for protection from the rain, just as our calves do with their moms in the pasture during storms. Of course, from the mudslide cascading down on this baby, there was no protection.

When we found the young T, Amelia couldn’t take it. She retreated to a boulder for a good cry. Brian said, “Ray, you’ve got a great girl there.”

“Don’t I know it!” he exclaimed. “And you know what, she can be anything she wants to be. If she wants to be a veterinarian, then that’s great. If she wants to be a paleontologist, that’s fine, too. We’ll figure out a way to be together.”

Laura responded to this pretty little picture by saying, “Get back to work, you guys.” But she said it with a smile on her face.

I pointed out some clouds on the horizon. “I think we’ve got rain coming our way.”

Laura studied the clouds with me. “We’ll keep tarps handy. That’s all we can do for now.” She looked at me and caught something in my expression. “What?”

“Do you believe in karmic events? I mean, we just found these dinosaurs killed by a rainstorm. Are we going to get punished for that by the rain gods?”

Laura took my observation seriously. I could tell by the way she rolled her eyes, then said, “Cut the bullshit, Mike, and get back to work.” I got back to work.

The digging kept on until we reached the last vertebrae in the mother T’s neck. There was no evidence of the skull. Pick came down to investigate. “I’m sure it’s here,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” Laura said. “The flood likely carried it away.”

“No, Laura,” Pick said quietly. “Don’t you feel it? Her spirit is still here. She will be here forever to protect this nest.”

“Spirit and skull are not the same,” ever-practical Laura said. “I’m telling you, Pick. We’re not going to find her skull. It’s gone.”

“Her skull is here,” he replied. “All of her is here. Her love for her family would not let any part of her leave. She has defeated deep time. Don’t you understand? She is watching us, trying to decide if we’re worthy. When she is ready, she will let us see her face.”

Laura smiled. “Pick, for a genius, sometimes you say the damndest and dumbest things. We could be making the same mistake, only in reverse, that was done for years with the Oviraptor.”

At our blank expressions, Laura explained that an Oviraptor was a theropod about the size of a large dog. When paleontologists first found a partial skeleton of one in China, it was lying beside a nest with eggs. They assumed that it was raiding the nest of an unidentified herbivore and named it Oviraptor or Egg Thief. The name stuck for decades until another skeleton was found, this one nearly complete, sitting on a nest. There were Oviraptor embryos in the eggs, which sealed the deal. Rather than being an egg thief, the Oviraptor was an example of a good dinosaur parent. Laura’s point was, with only this one T. rex nest found, Pick could be misinterpreting what he was seeing.