A Dawn of Mammals Collection Read online

  Everyone followed his instructions, including Hannah. She saw a bit of a sparkle and bent down to look closer. It was loose. She picked it up. Just a rock with one shiny face. She put down her backpack and pulled out her bottle of water. She packed in a full gallon, just in case, two half-gallon plastic milk cartons filled last night. One she had put in the freezer, and it was still half-frozen in her backpack. It would keep her lunch cool until noon.

  One by one, everyone else took off their packs and got a drink of water. The last kid to put down her pack was a short, stocky girl.

  “You with the pack, what’s your name?” said M.J.

  “Um, me?” She looked around.

  “You.”

  “Claire.”

  “Claire, you get another A-plus for the day.”

  “Why her?” asked a tall, athletic boy.

  “She looked for the longest time before setting down her bag. Fossil hunting is not a speed competition. One of the best paleontologists I know can sit with a four-by-four-foot area and spend all day at it.”

  “God, doesn’t she get bored?”

  M.J. laughed. “No. We’re a patient lot. And her patience pays off. She has found more small rodent bones—femurs, vertebrae, even tiny teeth—than anyone else I’ve met. The whole field owes a lot to her patience. Without her, we’d know less about mice and gophers and Daemonelix, and at their very beginnings.”

  Hannah could see his charm working on them. Now each wanted to be a special fossil finder who did important things for paleontology. Truth be told, his personality worked on her as well. Sometimes she saw through his surface. There was something darker in there, some cloud she couldn’t quite pull into focus. But the 10% of the iceberg you could usually see with M.J.—Doctor Maddox Hill, Junior, PhD twice over—was attractive, charming, and glib.

  And motivating. The kids all settled down to work, complaints about the hike and the heat forgotten. Hannah’s job was to tend to emergencies and help them decide if something was a fossil or not, but she knew they’d clamor for M.J.’s attention first. She dropped to a sitting position and began hunting too.

  The morning wore on, kids shouting excitedly, and then lapsing into embarrassed silence when told they had only found a rock. The shouts came less often. No one wanted to be seen as a fool several times in a row. A few of the kids closer to her started asking her to assess their finds instead of M.J. In one case, she thought she was looking at a bone, but it was terribly weathered.

  “I need your expertise,” she called to M.J.

  He wove between the other students to her side, following his own advice and keeping his eye on the ground before he put each foot down. He arrived and accepted the chunk of rock from the student. “Good eye,” he said to the student. “That’s a partial jawbone. No teeth, unfortunately. But they still might be around here.” He studied the ground. “You in the baseball cap, what’s your name?”

  “Ted.”

  “You see how the ground slopes from here toward you? The teeth from this skull might have gotten washed toward your section. So keep an eye out for tiny teeth.”

  The girl who had found the first fossil of the day was beaming with pride. “What sort of animal is it?”

  “I’m not sure yet. A lot of the identifying features are weathered. Could be a gopher, something like that. Look for small teeth, and if you find one, I’ll narrow it down. What’s your name?”

  “Jodi.” The girl bent to hunt with renewed enthusiasm. M.J. winked at Hannah and indicated with his head that she should stay close to the girl.

  Some time later, the mother called a halt for lunch. Jodi, looking for rodent teeth, didn’t want to stop. Hannah said to her, quietly, “They’ll still be there in fifteen minutes.”

  When the girl reluctantly sat up and her shadow shifted, Hannah could see a flash on the ground. “Wait a sec.”

  “Why?”

  “Right there, about eight inches from the toe of your right boot. No, over toward me more. Yeah, right around there. I see something shiny.” She coached Jodi to zero in on it.

  Finally, the girl saw it and grabbed it. “Oh my God, it’s a tooth. A real fossil tooth! But it’s so tiny!”

  Chapter 3

  The other kids started to rush over, but M.J. stopped them. “Wait! Remember, don’t trample anything. She can bring the bagged fossil over here in a minute.”

  Hannah helped Jodi put the fossil tooth back where she had found it—she was understandably reluctant to—and told her to take out bag, pencil, paper, cellphone. Hannah added the six-inch ruler she carried. They photographed it in situ, the ruler visible in every shot, and then the jaw bone, and Hannah took a precise GPS reading, explaining to Jodi how to work the dedicated GPS and letting her take the reading a second time. They recorded all that information on a slip of paper, put the tooth in one bag with its documentation, and the jawbone went in a larger plastic bag with another slip of paper.

  “Wow, this is real. Like, I’m doing real science,” said Jodi.

  “Not like you’re doing it. You are doing it. Your name will go onto this fossil. If it’s a brand new species, it’s your brand new species. Your discovery, and all the papers written on it would say that.”

  “Do I get to name it?”

  “M.J. will, but he’ll listen to your ideas. That is, if it’s a new species. It probably isn’t, I’m sorry to say.”

  “When will he know?” The girl was almost vibrating in excitement.

  “With that tooth? Immediately.” It never failed to amaze her about M.J. and the one other paleontologist she had worked with. Toss them a tooth, they gave it a one-second look, and recited genus and possibly species. It seemed a super-human retention of facts. Sometimes she forgot her own phone number.

  The girl took the bag with the tooth—holding it as if afraid it would break like an eggshell—over to where the others were gathered for lunch.

  Hannah took out a little metal stake with a pink flag and jammed it into the spot the tooth had been found. Jodi’s afternoon should be spent doing nothing else but looking in the foot circle around it. If she grew bored with it, the task would fall to Hannah.

  As she had predicted, M.J. knew the tooth’s source immediately. “Protospermophilus,” he said. “Scuridae.” With a smile at the confused expressions of the kids, he said, “A ground squirrel, like a chipmunk. Not rare, but not an abundant fossil, either. You did good, Jodi!”

  After the kids had oohed and ahhed over the fossil, they settled down to eat their packed lunches. There were complaints as they discovered what the heat had done to the food, but they were hungry and wolfed down their warm sandwiches and fruit and crushed bags of chips. Hannah stayed where she was, with her pack, eating her fruit slices smeared with peanut butter, thinking how much the extinct ground squirrel would have enjoyed that meal too. She finished with a little foil-wrapped serving of Laughing Cow cheese, which the ground squirrel would have probably passed over. Though who knows? We’d never know everything about the behaviors of extinct animals. This site was from thirty million years ago. A lot might change in that amount of time. And cheese—though a human invention—would surely appeal to a lot of animals.

  When the desserts were finished and trash put back in packs, M.J. said, “Before we get back to it, I want to show you where we found a cool fossil just a few weeks ago. Leave your rock hammers where you’re sitting so you know the spot.” He led them back up the trail and into a recess off the main canyon they were in, Hannah trailing along at the rear of the group. “Right up on this wall, we found a carnivore’s skull, almost complete. You can see where we dug it out.”

  “You said you don’t dig for fossils,” said one of the boys.

  “Not normally, but when it’s half-exposed, you chip out rock around it so you can get the whole thing out of the rock. The part that’s exposed will continue to weather if you don’t, and you’ll lose data.” He climbed up to the ledge, about fifteen feet up, where the fossil had been found. “So y
ou dig well around it, stopping to make sure there aren’t other bones. I mean, what if it’s a whole animal in there? Right?”

  A dozen faces were lifted, the expressions rapt, as they imagined a whole fossilized animal, just waiting to be released from the rock.

  M.J. went on. “So what we do is, we plaster the exposed part. Soak burlap straps in plaster we mix up right here on site. Let that dry, and start chipping away a foot around it in every direction.” He plucked out his rock hammer and mimed what he had done. “And when we have it attached on a fat pedestal, we plaster some more. And when that’s dry, we finish it off by pushing gently and steadily on it. It cracks off at the pedestal, we ease it down, put more plaster on the rest, and what we have then is a big round ball of plastered rock, with a fossil inside, like the caramel at the center of a fancy piece of chocolate.”

  Several questions came then. “Is it special plaster?”

  “Do you have it in the museum?”

  “Can we see it?”

  “Was there a whole animal there?”

  “How heavy was it?”

  He answered the last question first. “Ask Hannah about the weight. She carried it part of the way to the truck.”

  “Eighty-two-point-three pounds,” she said. “And yes, that hurt to carry.”

  The athletic kid, Ted, looked her up and down with some respect in his expression. “You could carry some of the smaller girls here, I bet.”

  “But not because they’re worn out at the end of the day,” she said.

  He flashed a smile at her.

  The heads all turned back to M.J. as he answered the rest of the questions. “It’s still in plaster, so I can show it to you, but all you’ll see is a plaster ball. I’m waiting for a terrific prep person I know to come at the end of August, and then we’ll open it up and start cleaning the rock away.”

  “Doesn’t that drive you crazy? Waiting?” asked Nari.

  “A little, yeah.” M.J. grinned. “It’s like having the presents under the tree for two weeks before Christmas, really wanting to know what’s beneath the bow, but wanting to wait too. You know?”

  Some nods.

  “As for what it is, that’s really exciting. It’s a nimravid.”

  “What’s the common name for that?” asked Rex.

  “There is no common name. It’s an extinct family. They looked like cats, but they aren’t cats.”

  Laina said, “Then why do they look like cats? Shouldn’t that make them cats?”

  “Evolution is why they looked like cats. Genetics. When something changes in the natural world, everything else changes to respond. Grass appeared. Soon, in geological time, there were more grass-eating animals around, so more predators evolved to exploit that food source. Some predators are big, some small, some sleek. Some hunt in day, and some hunt at night. Apparently on our planet, with the genetic codes all we Earthling mammals have, if there’s an empty spot for big hunting cats, something will evolve to fill the niche, even if it’s not Felidae, the cat family. And the physiological details will be much the same because they’re useful—”

  And that’s when the ledge he was on split with a sharp crack, and he went skittering down the fifteen feet in a rain of dust and rocks.

  Chapter 4

  Hannah yelled at the kids to get back, but everyone was in a panic. Screams competed with the noise of the rock fall. She pushed past one girl, then a boy, trying to get to M.J. But the dust from the rock fall made it impossible to make out anything. He had fallen the distance of a full story, like falling from a house roof, and onto hard Badlands rocks. It couldn’t be good.

  A girl was whimpering just ahead of her. She reached out and grabbed, finding a shirt and pulling the girl closer. It was Nari. “Are you hurt?” Hannah asked.

  The girl shook her head.

  “Move back toward the main canyon.” She pushed past a boy and gave him a shove in the same direction. The next kid she came upon was on the ground. The dust cloud was dissipating, but slowly, in the still, hot air. She squatted by the kid’s side and gently felt along the body, looking for broken bones or the telltale wetness of blood.

  He sat up. Garreth. “Wow,” he said. “That hurt.”

  “Where does it hurt?”

  He pushed up his shirt sleeve and showed her a long gash from elbow to wrist. “And it hurts over on my side too.”

  Hannah hoped it wasn’t a broken rib. “Do you think you can get up? Your back doesn’t hurt?”

  “No, it’s fine.” He got to his feet, only slightly unsteady, and Hannah held on to him until she was sure he wasn’t going to sink back down.

  “Show me where, on your side.”

  He pulled his shirt up and twisted around. “There. Oh, it’s bleeding a little.”

  It was bleeding, but only a little. “I have some first aid supplies. Walk back toward the main canyon, and I’ll get to you in a second, okay?”

  “Sure. At least this time it wasn’t me being a klutz. The wall just peeled away. Did you see it?”

  “I did. Do you know where M.J. is?”

  He shook his head and looked troubled. “Gotta be around here close. I was at the very front.”

  “Okay, get on back now, in case more is about to fall.” She gave his shoulder an encouraging squeeze and turned back to hunt for M.J. Or his body. She shivered at the thought. It would be a hard job to get someone out of here. She had a radio. Back at the museum, Sam had his turned on. But she had tested it the first time she had hiked the trail and, after the parking area, the signal did not reach the museum. If M.J. were injured, she’d have to run back to the bus to get through to Sam.

  But first, she needed to find M.J. and figure out how badly he needed help. The dust continued to settle, and she saw another crumpled form, five feet ahead, half-covered with small rocks. She hurried over. It was him.

  “M.J. You conscious? Can you hear me?”

  He moaned.

  She felt a wash of relief. At least he was alive. “Shh. Don’t move suddenly. What’s wrong? Where are you hurt? Any numbness?”

  He rolled over.

  She reached out to support his back, trying to keep it straight as he did. “You shouldn’t move.”

  “I think I’m...” he managed to say. “Okay. Semi-okay, at least.”

  “Be careful. Think, neck, back injury. We need to be cautious.”

  “I can feel everything. Too much. Yeah, my toes move, fingers.” He held up his hands and wiggled them to prove his point.

  “What hurts?”

  “Sort of all of it.” He struggled to sit up.

  She kept her hand on his chest. “Not yet. Let me do a quick exam.”

  “If you insist.”

  “Absolutely.” She turned her head and called back, “He’s alive and conscious. But stay back, just in case that rock face keeps crumbling. And someone go get my backpack. It’s by the pink flag.”

  She turned back and began an exam of his head, feeling relief that nothing felt wet. His ears were dry too, so no spinal fluid was leaking out. He twitched as she touched his shoulder. “You think that’s dislocated?”

  “Don’t think so. But I pulled something for sure. Just a muscle, I think.”

  “Okay, sorry if I get personal here.” She palpated his stomach lightly. “No pain?”

  “No, not there.”

  She had to clear rocks off his legs to check them. The dust continued to settle and she could see his face now, though she was down at his knees.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  She looked at him, saw where he was staring, back at the freshly exposed rock face, and she expected to see a fossil sticking out—because that would be entirely like M.J., lying there with strained muscles and bruises, and noticing only a fossil bone in the rock. But when she turned her head and looked at the rock face where he was staring, she saw it too.

  A bizarre shine. A dozen deep jewel colors, dancing and shimmering. Not on the rock face, but in front of it, a foot or two.
Like a curtain in the air made of...what? She couldn’t say, because the colors kept shifting and changing hue.

  “It looks like the Northern Lights,” said M.J.

  It did, sort of, but it tended toward royal blue and deep magenta more than green. “What the—?” she said.

  “I don’t know, but maybe it caused the rock fall.”

  She felt his leg shift and when she turned to look at him, he was sitting up. “Lie back.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, distantly, mesmerized by the strange light phenomenon.

  She glanced back at it. It was mesmerizing. There was a little stripe of deep yellow, like a waterfall of light, pearlescent, but then it faded and a deep purple took its place.

  A grunt came from M.J. as he struggled to his hands and knees.

  “M.J. For pity’s sake, lie back!” she said.

  “Look, you can’t carry me. If I can walk—”

  “I’ll call for a medevac copter.”

  “I don’t need it. If I did, they can’t get in here. We asked, three years ago, when we had nearly a ton of fossil to get out of here, about airlifting it. Trailhead is the best a helicopter could do.”

  “But—”

  “I’m okay, I think.” He put one leg underneath him to try and stand up.

  She jumped up to help him. “Use me for support.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, but he was moving very slowly. One shirt sleeve had a bloody streak.

  “You’re cut,” she said.

  At the same instant, Ted came running up with her backpack. “Sorry. I—” And then he caught sight of the shimmering curtain and said, “Whoa. What is that?”

  “No idea,” said M.J.

  “Hey, guys,” called Ted. “Come up here and look at this.”

  “But the rock,” Hannah said. “It could still be dangerous. Stay back.”

  The rest of the children, O’Brien at the rear, came closer despite her warning. Ted pointed out the shimmer. Exclamations came from nearly every mouth: “Cool.” “Amazing,” and words Hannah didn’t even know had slang usages, though they must mean the same thing.

  O’Brien said, “But what is it?”