Lew led me into the museum, signed me in at the desk—“Security,” he said importantly—then took me down a flight of stairs and through a heavy door into the basement. He shuffled a ways down a hallway and approached a door, whif
fled through his access-is-power array of keys, and chose one. Applied it to the lock. Swore underneath his breath. Chose another key. Succeeded in opening the door. Waved me into the room.
I found myself in a tight, no-frills laboratory littered with workbenches, peculiar tools, and wide metal storage shelves. Specimen storage was instantly recognizable even in the dim light that filtered down from the basement window high on the far wall. I could see the dark hulks of very old bones peeking out at me, big bones, bones that could only have belonged to something as large as a major dinosaur. I qualify that because not all dinosaurs were large. Some were as small as chickens. But Dan Sherbrooke was definitely a big-bone kind of guy.
Lew flipped on the banks of fluorescent lights, bathing the room in cold illumination. It was a homey, disarrayed room, coated with pale dust, sort of like having the backyard in your basement. The dust clearly stemmed from the process of picking plaster jackets and rock matrix off of fossils. And matrix picking there was, all up and down the heavy tables that commanded the center of the room, an astounding array of huge femurs and colossal vertebrae, each in a state of unearthing. The delicate tools of the operation lay all about, as did the crumbling wreckage of excavated rock. “There,” Lew said, sweeping a hand across the scene. “That’s what the fight’s about.”
The door to the lab opened behind us and I heard someone come in. A slight young man hurried past us, hunched painfully at the chest. I recognized him from the conference: he was Vance, the small weaselly fellow I had first seen nattering at Dan Sherbrooke about a problem with the poster tent and had last seen hissing to me about commercial collectors. Without making eye contact with either of us, he sat down at the table, switched on an exhaust fan, bent over a bone, and set furiously to work cleaning matrix off of it with a dental drill.
“What am I looking at here?” I asked, awed by the size of the bones before me.
“Allosaurus fragilis,”
Vance said without looking up. “About the biggest, fastest predatory dinosaur on record.”
“Bigger than
Tyrannosaurus rex?”
I asked.
Vance grunted disdainfully. “T. rex was bigger, sure, but he was a wanna-be. A scavenger. Or are you one of those Bakker fans?”
I tried to figure out how old Vance was, to sort him into S, for Dan’s student, or C, for colleague. His skin was already creased, but it looked to me like sun damage and there was no sag under the chin or fold around the mouth. I guessed that he was somewhere in his twenties. He had wispy mustaches the color of butter and thin, unkempt hair pulled back into a ponytail. He wore the same wire-rimmed glasses, white T-shirt, and sagging pants I’d first seen him in at the conference—or another set just like them—like he hadn’t changed clothes in two days, but the brand names and style were au courant.
I,
for impecunious, not
E,
for eccentric. That and the youth argued for
S
, for student.
As I watched him scratch away at the fossil in front of him, I contemplated the fierceness of his concentration. He went at his work with a fervor that held the twitchy overtones of barely contained anger. I had seen the type before. As a student, he was newly converted to the manias of the profession, hell-bent on advancing the science, and certain everyone but himself was a fool. I had seen him now three times, and had begun to feel a certain antagonistic affection for him. He was, after all, the only person at the conference who had spoken to me without seeming as if there was something he was either wanting from me or trying to keep from me.
“I’ve heard about the controversy surrounding
T. rex,”
I said. In dinosaur land,
T. rex
had the biggest of the two-legged meat-eating big. The leaf-eating sauropods—those big long-necked
dinos that walked on all fours like
Brontosaurus
and
Seismosaurus
—were infinitely larger yet, but at six tons and the height of a two-story building,
Tyrannosaurus
was no slouch. But it was the interpretation of the dinosaur’s feeding strategy that was in question. Was he really a king, or just an opportunist?
Vance paused to proselytize. He turned toward me but stared at the floor while he made short chopping gestures designed to convey the intensity of his message: “They named it
T. rex
because its six-inch-long fangs were so fucking big:
Tyrannosaurus rex,
the tyrant lizard king. Everybody’s hung up on big. That’s bullshit!”
I smiled at this petite man who was worried about size. He was right: we are a culture devoted to such images—to big-gests, longests, tallests, firsts, and fiercests. “But once that name was dealt out, it stuck,” I said. “I love watching those debates on PBS specials. In this corner, we have Bob Bakker, the guy with all the hair and the funny straw hat, and he thinks
T. rex
was the mighty hunter who chased his prey at high speed, grasped it by the spine, and throttled it—like a Russian wolfhound or something. In the other corner, we have Jack Horner speaking to us phlegmatically from some dig site in Montana, and
he
thinks
T. rex
was just a scavenger who kind of lumbered onto the scene after dinner had begun to grow ripe, days after it had died of natural causes. What’s the latest evidence?” I asked.
“The bones tell the story,” Vance answered without looking up. “You do a cast of the inside of the skull and what do you get? A big optical lobe, like you’d need for a visual hunter like a hawk or an eagle? No. You get a big olfactory lobe, just like a vulture.” He emphasized his statement with a decisive slash with his dental tool.
“But dinosaurs weren’t birds,” I said.
Lew snorted contemptuously.
Vance said, “Nope, they weren’t birds, just bird great-granddaddies.”
“And great-grandmommies?” I asked.
Lew snorted again, stuck his thumbs into his belt loops, and slouched.
Vance flinched each time Lew snorted. Studiously ignoring the lounging department tech, Vance flipped his glasses up onto his forehead and stared at a flaw in his fossil from only millimeters away. “
What
ever,” he muttered, “but also, the legs aren’t for running. The length and cross-sectional area of the femur is all wrong. And I know, I
know
what Bakker says about the size of the Achilles tendon and the cnemial crests on the tibia, but that’s all
qualitative
analysis, without a shred of
quantitative.”
“Oh.” He was beginning to lose me. “You’ve compared their proportions to those of modern animals.”
Vance sighed with exasperation. “He’d be
unstable
at high speeds, even if he could reach them instantaneously, and he’d fall over and break something under the weight of his own fall!”
“You mean an animal can exist that could crush itself by its own weight? That seems against nature.”
“Elephants,”
Vance said, brushing fiercely at a bit of plaster dust with a whisk broom. “You sit an
elephant
down with a dart so you can tag him, you’ve got to get him up fast, before he suffocates.”
“Oh. But dinosaurs weren’t mammals. They were reptiles. You can’t compare them straight across.”
“Avian,”
he corrected.
Avian, similar to birds. Interesting, but I needed to redirect the conversation to the fight between Dan Sherbrooke and George Dishey, not Cope and Marsh or Horner and Bakker. “So Dan has an
Allosaurus
here.”
“This is
one
of Dan’s allosaurids.
One
of them.
Dan
at least
has the wit to compare
individuals
before he draws conclusions about a whole
species.”
Here I could follow him. Paleontologists like to compare as many examples of a species as they can before publishing on it. That way, they are better able to discuss the range of characteristics within the group, rather than getting caught describing a genetic freak or a malformity as the norm. “What did George Dishey go after?”
“About anything he could find lying around.”
“Kind of like a vulture?”
Vance made a horizontal slicing motion with one hand.
“Exactly.
That’s our George. Fucking roadkill pimp.”
“Roadkill?”
Lew muttered, “It’s what you call a poorly preserved fossil.”
I thought for a while. Surely there was no way for paleontologists to dictate what they were going to find. They were the ultimate scavengers, opportunistic hunter-gatherers who just went after whatever the gods of erosion happened to leave at the surface. That was the big gag about bone hunting: A perfect skeleton could lie a millimeter beneath the surface and a paleontologist could walk right over it and never know it was there. So it was not really paleontologists who found fossils; it was rain and wind and ice, those busy little forces of weather that dig constantly at the landscape all around us. “So, Vance,” I said, “you don’t think much of Dr. Dishey’s work.”
“What’s there to like? He published gray literature, fucking puff pieces in
Ladies’ Home Journal.
I’d have liked to have seen him go up against a jury of his so-called peers just
once!”
I considered asking Vance what George Dishey had done to him to get him so pissed. But just then, Vance slammed down his dental pick. “I mean, I don’t get why you’re sounding so supportive of him. You were his last conquest! Doesn’t that sting just a little?”
I thought long and hard before answering. I was embarrassed,
yes, but not as much by the appearance that I was George’s last bimbo as by the fact that I’d bought one of his lies. I cared about trusting myself, and being taken in by George’s lies had shaken my self-security. Tit for tat, I presented about the nastiest comeback I could think of, as much to see what would happen as to get my licks in: “Why, are you jealous?”
Vance’s eyes shrank into slits.
“I
am not a
groupie,”
he sneered. “I do real work. I collect real data. I form hypotheses and have the balls to present them to my colleagues, laying my ideas open to scrutiny, asking that they be supported or disproven.
That
is science.
George
wrote popular jerk-off articles that the boys and girls
swooned
over. I mean, shit;
you
saw him!”
“Saw him what?”
“At the conventions. He’d walk around in his paleontologist suit—we wear T-shirts, he’s got to wear a baggier one; we wear our hair long, he’s got to wear his longer, a mockery of the rest of us—waving that fucking brass jaw of his! Like he was
trolling
for
groupies!”
Vance’s venom was so caustic that it took me a moment to recall that he was talking about a man two decades or more his elder. I smiled. George Dishey had probably been growing long hair and whiskers while Vance was still in diapers.
I indulged myself in an urge to touch the wide end of the four-foot-long femur at which Vance was picking. It was rough and cold. “I can’t for a moment believe that personal style has anything to do with this. So it’s really something else, isn’t it? Spell it out to me, Vance. What was George up to that pissed everybody off so much?”
The young man spun around in his chair and faced me, his hands balled up into fists. His face had turned so red that I was afraid it might explode. Through his tiny yellow teeth, he hissed, “He sold bones!”
“He what?”
“Sold
‘em. Went out and dug them up just to
sell
’em. Regular
whore!”
“Is that what you meant by a ‘commercial collector’?”
Vance’s face darkened to almost purple. “That’s too kind a term for George Dishey.” Vance’s hands began to tremble. “Oh, sure, there are amateurs out there who’ll sell a find to a rock shop, and there are even pros who have a regular business doing that kind of supply. But they aren’t
Ph.D.’s.
George
was.
That’s
prostitution!”
Having said this, Vance jumped up from his chair and raced out of the laboratory just as abruptly as he had entered it.
“Oh,” I said. But I didn’t understand, not really.
I WAS QUIET for a moment, waiting for the proverbial dust to settle on the scene. Then I asked Lew, “Is there something I’m missing?”
Lew turned his hands outward. “Hey, I’m just a tech.”
“Oh, come on, Lew, you brought me over here to show me something.”
Lew stared at the floor, deciding how much more he was going to tell me. “Let’s just say that grad students get a little … unbalanced after a while. Me, I go home at night and have a beer, watch a little TV, and life doesn’t get so serious. But these students,” he said, his voice taking on a heavy note of insinuation, “they bust their humps for wonderful old Dan or some other blowhard like him, living in some lousy tent eating beans, trying to dig up something good enough to write their dissertation on. And you know there’s no job waiting for them. Kind of makes you wonder if they’re quite right in the head, don’t it?”